


I'll Find You in the Morning Sun

by Cominguproses13x



Category: The 100 (TV), The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fluff, Like crazy slow burn, Like get ready to want to pull your eyes out slow burn, Modern Era, Slow Burn, Slow Dancing, They're pretty pathetic in all honesty, Zombie Apocalypse, it's actually not that bad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2020-03-08 04:50:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 44
Words: 418,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18887521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cominguproses13x/pseuds/Cominguproses13x
Summary: 'Every lover is a soldier. Love is a warfare.'





	1. I am sick of the chase, but I'm hungry for blood

**Author's Note:**

> The Zombie Apocalypse AU that nobody asked for...  
> Prep for the long haul!  
> 'Death is not an energy drink'  
> EM x

There is a snap beneath the sole of her boot when she takes the first step inside. Clarke feels the glass crackle against her foot, and she lets herself relish in the prickles the sound sends over her. Shards line the floor as far as the eye can see, and she shoots Raven a look, a warning to be careful.

There are too many ways the infection can spread, any sort of contact with tainted blood can be fatal and by the looks of this place, walkers have been here. It’s not a surprise. They’ve been everywhere by now. It could have been months ago; it could have been hours ago. Either way, it’s too late to turn back now.

They’ve been running low on supplies for days. The sorts of things that they just can’t fashion from stagnant ponds and tree bark; first aid kits, socks that haven’t been shredded from overuse.

Raven leads the way through the entrance to the small-town mall, her shotgun held sternly away from her shoulders and Clarke flanks her from behind so she can make sure they’re covered from all areas.

“There’s a grocery store on the third floor,” Raven says, her voice harsh against the sounds of broken glass beneath their feet.

“How do you know?”

“There was a notice board back there,” she nods her head towards the way they came in before taking off again.

Clarke scrambles to keep up, holding the bow in her hands loaded against her thigh with the string stretched tight- always the just in case.

“I would kill for a beer,” Raven whispers as they start to ascend the frozen escalators.

The next floor looks brighter, the only light source being the harsh glares of a full moon. Clarke takes note that they’ll have more visibility the higher up they are, but she isn’t sure if that cancels out the extra mileage they’ll have to cover if they do run into a horde.

She considers places like these, apartment buildings, department stores, airports, to be the highest risk. There’re always some walkers who seemed to have figured out that there can be endless hiding spots for meat in tall, once-crowded buildings.

“Remember what we said about luxuries,” She warns, shrugging the rucksack that stretches the length of her spine more comfortably over her shoulders.

Her partner sighs and smacks her lips like she’s disappointed.

“I’ll just add it to the list,”

Ever since they’d ran into each other- on a highway just south of Jackson- they had started a list, seemingly miles long of the things they’d want to do if the apocalypse ever sorted itself out. Not that there is any chance of that, Clarke is perfectly aware that miracles do not exist, but it’s sort of kept them going. Just that ounce of hope.

They track down the supermarket and trace the individual aisles, not looking for food; they know that anything salvageable would be long gone, but to make sure there is nothing hiding in the shadowed corners of the store. The continued silence adds as a confirmation and they head to the very back, searching for the heavy doors that lead to the stock room.

It was Clarke who had figured this hack out within the first month of the infection, when she had entered her sixth supermarket only to find the shelves filled with either rotten food or scraped bare of even the price tags. Amongst the panic, people had forgotten to check the storage rooms.

“I’ll keep watch,” Raven nods and Clarke glances to her, conveying everything she wants to say each time they separate but never has the time for. You spend enough time with someone, living a lifestyle such as this and it becomes sort of impossible not to develop some secret code.

Clarke unloads her bow and shoves the unused arrow back into the quiver that she’s shoved roughly into her pack before she tosses the bow around her shoulder. She’s got a pistol somewhere in the depths of her bag, the one from her father’s safe, but she has known since she can remember how much better she is with a bow and arrow, even if it is a bit fiddly.

Clarke takes the time to search through a few boxes, using sense of smell alone to determine which ones might be promising and eventually stumbles upon the motherload of dried fruit and tinned beans. A delicacy compared to raw salmon and the nettles they had to harvest a while back.

She takes off her pack and shoves as many bags of raisins and nuts into it as she can, before loading up a separate compartment with the cans.

There’s always the potential that she might be able to find some sort of vodka or Something to appease their growing need for relief, but she wants to get out of this place as quickly as she can. Being inside is always a danger nowadays; there’s only so many times you can survive having to fight your way out of an attack.

Clarke hastily swings the bag back onto her shoulders, taking only a moment to adjust to all the added weight, then leaves to find Raven once more. Her mouth is already dry at the thought of having been separated for more than five minutes.

Before she stumbles out though, she trips on something that makes a ringing sound and when Clarke glances down, she sees the golden honey color of a full bottle of whiskey. Unable to help herself, she bags it hastily then double-times her way out of the stockroom, the ghost of a smile gracing her lips.

“You good?” She asks when she catches sight of the brunette ponytail.

Raven’s shoulders relax just a fraction when her eyes fall to Clarke, like she’s been holding her breath since their separation. It’d be laughable- how much they feel the need to be joined at the hip- if it just wasn’t.

“Yeah, let’s get out of here,”

Her gaze lands on the stark white of an arm-length and bloodied shape. The sight of the bone burns its way through her mind, and she knows that they have been here for sure.

Raven has something in her hands, playing with it in her fingers and when Clarke looks to see what it is, Raven smirks slightly. It’s a kid’s tiara, made of faded plastic and cracked gemstones, yellow glue seeping from where it was hastily thrown together.

“Found it over there,” Raven says, nodding towards the direction they came through and Clarke turns to look, knowing she won’t see anything but shadows. When she looks back to her friend, the crown is already being placed on her head, scratching its way into the knotted mass of tangles and she decides to let Raven have her fun.

The brunette doesn’t say anything more, just waits for Clarke to reload her bow and lead the way back out of the store, battle-stances regained.

There is a hiking store a few shops down and they pace to it in silence. Clarke takes watch this time, allowing Raven to go and search for some more gear. She leans back against the wall of the store and takes a one-eighty view of the mall, noticing nothing peculiar. It’s only a matter of time, she thinks to herself, before slumping down and lolling her head back.

“You think there’s any chance of us finding a radio that works?” she calls in to the shop.

Raven snorts.

“Slim to none,”

“I thought so,” Clarke agrees reluctantly. “I’m just nervous about Nebraska,”

“You don’t think it’ll be there?”

Clarke has been thinking about it all day. She’d heard about the Nebraskan safe house before she’d even met Raven. And it’s not like the population of walkers hasn’t been growing, so there’s every likelihood it might have been contaminated.

“I don’t want to fall into a trap,”

She can practically see the tumbleweed drift across the floor from here and the fatigue hits her temples like a hammer.

Selfishly, she hopes Raven will take a while to find what she needs because Clarke doesn’t think she can do this for much longer. Sometimes she needs to let herself feel weak. She needs to have that one bit of humanity, now and then.

She takes the arrow in her fingers and spins it around each one, like she’d seen her father do once upon a time. She had always been in awe, as a kid, of how he could do it, but it comes to her like second nature now. Clarke watches as the silver flicks between her fingers, presses her thumb against the tip of the arrowhead and finds intrigue in how it draws blood so quickly.

It’s foolish, because it’s so easy for cuts to become infected. But it’s done now.

Her own blood looks strange in the dark light of the mall. Maybe after seeing so much putrefied blood turned rotten brown in the last few months, it has become odd to see normal _human_ blood. So, she watches how it runs down her thumb, independently choosing its own valley, like it has a mind of its own.

It goes all the way from her thumb to her wrist and then it catches on the sleeve of her flannel to merge with the bright red fibers. She’s stopped by a sound that is way too familiar.

They need to leave. Now.

She doubts she’ll ever be able to actually catch a break.

“Raven?” Clarke calls, but there’s no reply and a familiar rush of panic floods through her. “Raven!”

She has to be in there. She just has to be. She can’t not be.

“Clarke?” Raven’s voice sounds from the back of the store and she breathes a sigh of relief.

“You hear that?” Clarke cringes at her subtlety.

“What do you think?” She whispers when she finds Raven down a barren aisle particularly for penknives. “We need to go,”

Clarke grabs her hand without thinking and Raven has to heave her bag over her shoulder on the move. They sprint out of the store; while she doesn’t see any walkers around, Clarke knows they aren’t far off. And in places like this, the hordes can be unthinkable.

“Stairs, Clarke, stairs,” Raven breathes, not even bothering to keep her voice down now that she knows they’ve been caught out.

“The sound came from that way,” Clarke says back, and they start running in whatever direction they think of.

“Well, how else do you expect to get out?”

Again, it’d be funny if it just… isn’t.

Clarke looks to Raven and reads the reflected panic in her eyes.

“We’ll be okay, Rae. We’ll be fine,” she has to say it, mainly for herself but Raven relaxes just the slightest in her palm. “Let’s just make sure we get out of this,”

She braces herself on Clarke’s shoulders, both hands gripping tightly and the unspoken word _together_ lingers.

Then there’s running coming from surprisingly close and sure, Clarke doesn’t know everything there is to know about zombies, but they definitely do not run as fast or as clean as that.

“Clarke, we need to go. Now.”

They run the rest of the way to the static escalators they’d climbed before and there’s still that rhythmic thunder of _something_ running behind. They reach a staircase and Clarke shoves Raven in front of her on instinct, following close behind.

“Raven there’s another staircase at the back of the second floor. Take that!” she says when she sees movement at the bottom of the lower escalator. Raven doesn’t reply but carries on running through to the second story and they sprint across the level, still with palms pressed together, feet clapping the tile in time.

Then Raven throws her head back- probably to see how much distance they’ve put behind them- but whatever she sees makes her stop in her tracks which, because of their linked fingers, ultimately brings Clarke to a halt.

The fear that’s coursing through Clarke’s veins is immediately eclipsed by confusion and she turns to Raven, hair flipping into her eyes.

She looks as though she’s seen a ghost; Clarke cautiously follows her eyeline for a moment while time stands still.

Two people are standing about twenty feet away from them, stopped too. Walkers don’t stop. It’s completely dark by now, so Clarke can’t see their skin but, judging from their silhouettes, there’s a guy and a girl, both with midnight dark hair and both holding assorted guns, directed straight to Clarke and Raven.

Clarke doesn’t care. The risk is too great, and she can’t be sure of what they are.

“Come on,” She demands, losing what little control she has over herself and she tugs on Raven’s forearm harshly.

When she still doesn’t respond, Clarke raises her bow and loads it as quickly as she can, training it on the silhouettes in front of them.

 _Get it together,_ she tells herself sternly. She needs to take back control, otherwise she won’t make it out of this. _They_ won’t make it out of this.

“Raven,” she says, but this time there’s no panic or hysteria in her voice. Instead, it’s low and cold and deadly.

“Clarke,” Raven whispers back, letting her know that she can actually respond, but her voice sounds stunned. Maybe they really are seeing ghosts.

The two standing before them are still footed in the shadows, regardless of the moonbeams glaring through the windowed ceiling.

Raven takes the smallest step forward but it’s enough for Clarke to become worried once more.

“Raven stop,” she warns.

“Clarke,” Raven says again but it’s more certain this time. Still, Clarke can’t back down. Not when she’s about to risk her life.

The figures aren’t moving at all, but the noises of the oncoming walkers are only getting closer.

“I think it’s fine,” she whispers again.

“Raven Reyes?” A feminine voice sounds from opposite them and Clarke’s arrow shifts to aim for the vocalist. But it sounds light and so out of place of somewhere so dark.

Raven takes another step towards the voice, her expression unreadable.

“Step back.” Clarke says and she can taste the coldness in her own tone.

“Clarke give it a rest,” Raven groans, turning to face her friend; the look she gives Clarke is practically pleading. “Blake?” she asks, quietly like she doesn’t quite believe the words she’s saying.

The four of them are quiet and the noises of incoming walkers grow like a rising fire; flames starting to touch the surface of Clarke’s skin.

“Raven, please,” Clarke tries one more time, begging now.

Raven completely turns her back to the figures now, grabbing both Clarke’s arms and looking her dead in the eye.

“Clarke just shut up for two seconds. Can’t you see they’re clean?”

She gently shrugs her off and Raven takes that as her cue to keep talking to the strangers.

Clarke’s still not convinced.

“What are you doing here?” The girl asks, all melodic and easy.

“What does it look like?” Raven asks back, but the girl’s answer is clouded by a movement just between the two.

It’s only a tiny shift in the dispersal of light, but Clarke, for some goddamn reason, acts on impulse and releases the arrow from her fingers to pierce whatever was standing behind who she thinks must be Blake.

“Jesus- fuck!” A voice she hasn’t heard yet shouts and it is deep and low and must belong to the guy, who’s hands have raised to cover his head, and both of them have lowered their stance, as though they’re dodging showers of incoming bullets. “You almost took my head off!”

“Would you rather me let you get mauled?” Clarke asks, the confusion swiftly becoming replaced by anger as she watches the figure that has crumpled to the floor behind them. She can see the bright purple veins in its greyish skin from here and she’d hit it exactly where she’d been aiming for, but it is still making gurgling sounds. They always do.

Clarke can still hear others coming for them, so she reloads.

“Bellamy be nice,” the girl mutters angrily to the guy before she turns back to face Raven. “You are… you, right?”

“Yeah, O, we’re clean,” Raven nods and she breathes a sigh of relief.

“Where are you guys heading?”

“Vancouver,”

“No shit,” the girl- Blake? – gasps, like she’s just found some sort of cure-all drug.

“Tag along with us. We could use two new faces and frankly, Clarke’s starting to piss me off,” Raven smirks, shooting a side-eye to her friend but Clarke can’t quite find the humor in it.

“Raven shut up,”

“O, we aren’t just ‘tagging along’ with random strangers,” the man says, the exhaustion blatant in his voice.

“Raven’s not a stranger, Bell and you know that. We’ve known each other for ages,”

“Octavia,”

They’re interrupted by a scream much closer now and Clarke bristles, shifting her focus from the arguing couple back to their dark surroundings.

Raven beats her to speaking though.

“Okay, we’ve got two options. We leave separately and chance our luck, or we stick together and become twice as strong. We’re clean and you’d have to be fucked in the head to lie about that shit. I trust you, O, and I know you trust me too,” she pauses for the smallest second while she whirls around and faces Clarke again. “Clarke, can you stop being a stubborn bitch for two seconds, just to consider that this might help us?”

The walkers have reached the second floor- Clarke can see them now- they’re jostling and shoving across each other, all swaggering like they’re unbalanced.

There isn’t time to argue anymore.

“I don’t like this,” she starts, looking to the couple. “But right now, we’ve got more important things to worry about.”

They don’t say anything, so she points behind her.

“The exit’s that way,”

“We know where the exit is, Princess,” the man, still hidden in the shadows, says gruffly but before Clarke can respond, the girl shoves him a bit.

“Bellamy, if you’re gonna be a child then I’m going to leave you behind to the walkers,”

“Shove it, O. Stop wasting time,”

Raven nudges her shoulder playfully then whispers in her ear, “Clarke, he sounds just like you!”

“Raven, I’m not kidding now,” Clarke says, but she doesn’t need to finish because Raven turns, and the look in her eyes alone is enough to tell Clarke that she’s with her now. She’s here.

Raven grasps her hand once more and they turn, not before she gestures to the others to follow them, and they rocket through the rest of the mall, falling upon the back-alley staircase that was notified on the display board and tumble down it. Clarke loses track of where her feet are going and follows only the tug of the adrenaline rushing through her head.

This flight of stairs somehow feels longer than the last- maybe perpetuated by the screaming that is following them so closely now.

They make it to the bottom of the narrow staircase and Clarke, foolishly, looks back to see how close they are to any Walkers. There’s definitely not enough space between them.

Raven spots the fire escape and pushes her way out of it, coughing once she gets outside like she’s just been inhaling fumes, but Clarke keeps pulling at her arm in some sort of frantic sprint.

The burning in her legs comes back and her head hurts with how loud everything is. If those things don’t shut the fuck up then they are just going to attract more and more. It’s only a matter of time before they’re trapped.

“We aren’t going to outrun them like this. They’ll just follow us,” The man says, jogging behind Clarke like he’s just out for a run.

“Speed up then,” Clarke growls, losing her patience more and more by the second.

“Princess, there’s a back alley coming up. Make a right and I’ll cover you,”

“I’ll help,” The flash of brunette sprinting next to him says, but Clarke can’t see their faces because she’s focused on reloading her bow.

“O don’t be an idiot. Follow Raven and I’ll catch up,”

“Bellamy this is not the time to be a martyr,” Raven shouts and there’s no humor in her voice whatsoever.

“It’s not being a martyr if you’re keeping everyone alive,”

“Yes, it literally is,” Clarke says because she can’t quite help herself.

“Bell, the second you start firing, every walker in a twenty-mile radius will come running,” the girl says, like they’ve done this many times before.

“Well, I can’t see anyone offering up something else,”

Clarke feels her mind spin for a moment and then everything around her stops. If they go into the alley, it could be a dead end, so that’s not an option. If they turn off into another building, that could be filled with any number of walkers and they’d be running straight into a trap, so that’s not an option. If they just keep going as they are then the sound of the horde behind them is just going to spur on more and more to join them and eventually, there will be too many. So that’s not an option either.

“You and your fucking socks,” She growls under her breath to Raven, cursing their decision to even try the mall in the first place, then turns a bit so she can talk to the two behind them. “We can’t turn that way, the alley will either be a cut-off or it’s gonna take us straight into the heart of the city. I say we get back to the highway: it’ll slow them down trying to get through the cars and we can do what we were doing earlier to get out of it.”

“What, dancing across the hoods?” Raven pants.

“Dancing across the hoods,” Clarke smirks, just starting to lose her breath, but it’s enough to make her giddy.

“Dancing across the hoods,” _O_ smiles, and Clarke takes her in for the first time. Her hair could be made from milk chocolate and she has piercing cold eyes; a bone structure that makes her look like her cheeks have been shaped by something immortal. She might have been a model some time before the infection. Clarke would believe that.

“Sorry, I don’t speak bullshit,” Bellamy huffs, still in his mellow jog. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“No time to explain,” Clarke breathes. “The turn off is coming up. The highway should be about a half hour run from here. Do you think we can make that?”

“Please,” Raven snorts through the blackened air and they sprint in silence the rest of the way.

Clarke tries her best to ignore the howls coming from behind them, but it is hard to when they’re only getting louder. Over the sound of her own heart pounding, she can hear Raven’s rhythmic panting and the low, regulated breaths of the man behind her. She chooses to focus on the way his feet fall, because their low bass are the only thing keeping her present. They land much slower than hers which manages to piss Clarke off somehow: her skin doesn’t really have a maximum capacity for the number of things that can get under there.

It’s strange to be thinking about the presence of two more people by her side. How is she meant to think straight when it’s not just Raven to look after?

She’ll come back to that one.

“Next corner,”

They turn, but it’s sharp and before they know it, they are running straight to two more straggling walkers, both coming for them hungrily. Of course they’re hungry; zombies don’t have any other mode.

Maybe Raven raises her rifle to her sight, maybe Bellamy has his shotgun up to shoulder length behind her, but it’s too late because Clarke feels time slow once more and she doesn’t really think before she feels what she does.

She twists her bow in her hand, letting it turn horizontally and loads it. Clarke fires the arrow at the leading figure and doesn’t watch where it lands, knowing exactly where it’s going to end up anyway. Then she’s already placed another into the arrow rest and that one leaves just as quickly. This time, Clarke does watch where it’s going, because she’s still on the move and they’re about to approach the bodies. Both have landed backwards on the ground, long aluminum sheaths sticking up from the middle of their throats, like the stems of beheaded metallic flowers.

Clarke brushes past them, feet still thumping against the wet ground; when she turns a bit to see Raven doing that smug side smirk, she just flashes her eyebrows and carries on.

They reach the highway after about twenty minutes, and Clarke doesn’t wait before she jumps up onto the hood of a pretty low, pretty new Peugeot and she has to slow herself now so that she doesn’t slip from the metal. Eventually, she gets a handle on it and the others take the hint, climbing up and jumping from car to car.

Clarke wishes they could slow down with it, because she can imagine her younger self watching them from the trees and knows that she’d have loved this as a kid. Pretending that the floor is hot lava or crocodile infested swamps with her father. But that’s gone now.

Bellamy falls back a bit; he probably has to go a bit slower so that he doesn’t throw himself off balance, but Clarke swiftly realizes that O- maybe that’s not quite her real name- is in her element. She’s floating across the surface of the cars like she’s wearing ice skates and it’s kind of beautiful to see.

Raven sticks close to Clarke, probably out of habit as they’re never not within five feet of each other when it can be helped, and it is clumsy and awkward but it’s working. The route above the road is just significantly faster than trying to navigate through each individual car.

“This is stupid,” Bellamy mutters under his breath when he slips for the fourth time. “Octavia! Don’t go so far, it’s dark!”

 _Octavia_ , that’s nice.

But he shouts so loud that it echoes through the stationary traffic and Clarke whirls around in frustration.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

He looks up from where his feet are planted, looking only vaguely insulted.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you want to shout any louder? I don’t think the walkers in Phoenix heard you,”

He exhales; Clarke would take that to be him laughing if he didn’t look so pissed off, so easily wound up, so ready to snap.

He doesn’t answer her, so she pushes forward to catch up with the girl ahead.

She doesn’t say anything either.

“I think we’re in the clear now,” Raven calls out from behind about an hour later, and they all slow down, taking to leisurely hopping across now. Like it’s recreational.

“We can’t stop,” Clarke says back. They’re still too close. It’s not like the walkers have stopped moving just because they can’t see their prey anymore.

“Let’s give it another hour and then we can make camp,” Octavia chimes, with that light voice again.

Clarke starts to fall back a bit. She begins to form a game in her head where she sees how many chains of the same type of car she can form beneath her feet, so she has to take a windy route for some time. It’s worth it though, because now she doesn’t have to think about the three zombies she’s had to kill tonight. Now she’s got something else to preoccupy herself with.

That is, until someone jumps on to the same car she’s on and tugs at the quiver of arrows behind her back. Clarke spins on her heels, but the metal of the ceiling is still icy wet, and she slips.

Hands catch her waist roughly, but it’s enough to stop her from falling again, and when she regains her balance, thanks to the warm fingers wrapped under her ribcage, Clarke looks up into Bellamy’s warm brown eyes, the same color as his girlfriend’s hair.

She hasn’t had a chance to properly look at him yet, but now, they’re standing directly beneath the moon, and she can see as its beams trace the thick black curls through his hair. He doesn’t look quite Caucasian, but Clarke can’t pin down where his golden skin would come from. There’s a scar on his nose bridge, like it’s been recently broken. Or recently rebroken.

“You forgot those,” he says, taking his hands back to point at her arrows.

Clarke turns her gaze to see three arrows protruding from her caddy, clumsily added in so that they’re arrowhead up, disgusting brown blood dripping from the spearheads.

“Thanks,”

He must have retrieved them from the carcasses while they were on the move, and the thought hits Clarke like a truck.

She moves to keep going on her own and stops playing her game so that she can catch up to Raven again. When she gets within earshot of her friend, Clarke slows down so she can listen to what the two girls are talking about. She’s curious. That can’t be a crime. There aren’t really crimes anymore.

“I can’t believe we found you,”

“It’s crazy… of all the people,”

Clarke’s never been good at subtlety. She trips on the wing mirror of another car as she cranes her ear to listen and almost falls off, which alerts Raven to her presence and the brunette spins around to give her an easy smile.

“Clarke, this is Octavia Blake, she was my roommate at MIT,”

“You went to MIT too?” Clarke asks, relenting to her curiosity.

Raven left for Boston five years ago to study mechanical engineering, and came back to New Orleans two years ago. She’d chosen not to get a PhD, regardless of her supervisors telling her that she was a natural born physicist, because her grandfather died and there was no one left to take care of her brother.

Octavia snorts at her question, but Clarke doesn’t take that as an insult.

“Nah, I was at BU studying business. I was in my fourth year too. Was meant to graduate this year,”

She doesn’t say much more, because there’s not really anything else to say, for now. Sparse conversation isn’t exactly a rarity, and probably couldn’t be any more than a rarity considering the number of people Clarke has actually spoken to since the infection. She’s used to silence, to silence littered through her own thoughts.

Seeing that the unfamiliar couple are just as used to silence, is at least something.

 

…

 

“Why Vancouver?” Bellamy asks, about an hour later, when the two girls have raced ahead once more, leaving Clarke to stumble aimlessly next to him.

“Why do you need to know?” she asks, exhausted. She thinks it is a fair point- she doesn’t have to like these people. She didn’t get a choice in them tagging along.

“Why shouldn’t I?” He sounds just as tired, but his words are laced with an entitlement that crawls up her skin, feels the way carpet does when hands fight against the natural lean of the fibers. “They seem to trust each other, don’t they?”

“So?”

She ignores the hand he holds out when she has to cross a particularly risky gap.

“Sorry. There was me assuming Raven wouldn’t be tagging along with a total brat,”

He says it quietly, so weary that Clarke almost misses it. Almost, being the key word.

“And there was me hoping the people I get stuck with aren’t invasive pricks,”

Bellamy sighs loudly, which reminds Clarke of how a nine-year-old boy might react to his mother scolding him.

“Octavia is not a prick,” he sulks after a moment of silence.

“No,” Clarke thinks, pretending to genuinely consider his strop. “Maybe _Octavia_ isn’t,”

“Why Vancouver?” He bites again, as though for the sake of it, as though for the simple opportunity of digging deeper through her skin, and Clarke fumes at his resilience.

“Family,” She says, trying to race ahead so that she won’t have to talk to him any longer. But he keeps up with the pace she sets, having the gall to smirk at her frustration.

“Raven has never mentioned family in Vancouver?”

“ _My_ family,”

“She’s taking you all that way?” he asks again, and Clarke stops at that.

“Excuse me?”

It’s probably not smart to piss off someone who carries a shotgun so easily but, then again, Clarke’s fluent in archery and he doesn’t seem to have a problem with aggravating her.

“Well, I just figured…”

Bellamy seems to think better of whatever he goes to say, but it’s too late. Clarke hears his implication loud and clear.

“You figured what?”

“You just don’t seem like the type…” he resigns. Though he didn’t try very hard to not say it.

“You can finish,” Clarke says and kicks the windshield of a Volvo she passes because of how much this guy is rubbing her up the wrong way. “Despite what you might think, I’m not going to break on the spot,”

He looks like he’s had enough too, because he whirls on her with an expression that lets her know he’s just as pissed.

“You don’t look like the type to have survived this long on your own,”

The corners of her lips turn up. Clarke considers him, smirks at his ignorance, at the easy flaw he’s managed to capture that comes with this sort of isolation.

“I think you’ll find that I’m the one who saved _her_ life back there,” she says, because she can’t help herself. How dare he insinuate that she’s weak, without knowing her for more than a few hours?

“Lucky shot?” he smirks back, and the look paired with the harsh beams of the moonlight make him look vicious, almost like a wolf ready for hunt.

“Lucky misfire,” she hums and this time, when she darts ahead to catch up with the others again, he doesn’t follow her.

 

…

 

Raven is the one who calls time on their escape. The moon rests low on the skyline and they reach a road sign that tells them there’s a gas station a few miles ahead. Clarke thinks that they’re all in agreement that they could do without another run-in, at least for another night.

They decide to set up what can barely be called camp behind a long, never ending row of shrubs that line the highway. They’re at the base of a steepish hill, but there’s not really much they can do about that now; trying to climb the rough mud bed in the dark is a recipe for a sprained ankle.

They know they can’t build a fire either, not when they’re this close to the hordes, but no-one is sleepy. They sit awkwardly in a circle and Clarke reaches to sort out her pack, dripping a ration of her water over the retched arrowheads.

“I’ll take first watch,” Bellamy says, but even his girlfriend doesn’t answer him. There’s that sobriety again, always lingering at the surface of every collision with a walker.

Clarke guesses that the sun should be rising in a few hours and she’ll have to wait until then to find which direction they need to be heading in. For the first time in a long time, she feels utterly helpless, like she’s lost all control. It’s horrible.

Octavia lies down next to Clarke’s feet, resting her head on a moss formed pillow that looks sodden wet, but she doesn’t close her eyes, just looks up and watches the night sky.

“Raven,” she starts, then closes her mouth like a goldfish for a moment, collecting her thoughts. Clarke watches with that curiosity again, wondering what she’s going to say.

“Yeah, O?” Raven lifts her head from where she’s scraping her boots against a less muddy surface of the ground and scoots over to Clarke, resting her hip against hers.

“Where’s Isaac?”

Raven stills. Clarke can feel her body tense up beside her, moves to rest her hand on her friend’s ankle. It probably looks a bit weird but it’s the only thing Clarke thinks to do- sometimes just a touch can make her feel that little bit better. They’ve known each other for too long not to share that.  

“He’s gone,”

“I’m sorry,” the girl says, turning to face them with a genuinely saddened expression. Her eyes are narrowed like she’s trying to work something out in her head, or like she’s trying not to cry. That’s usually what Clarke does whenever she needs to hold back tears. She must have known it before she asked. His presence, or lack thereof, would have been enough to know.

“It’s okay,”

“No, it’s not,” Clarke says, because how can she not? It wasn’t okay. None of it is okay. Especially not the nights Raven spent sobbing into Clarke’s shoulder about the loss of her brother. She knows the story and it’s an ugly one; Clarke is selfishly glad that Raven doesn’t go into any more detail because she doesn’t think she could handle hearing it again.

“You’re right, it’s not. But what else can I say?”

Clarke shrugs her shoulders. Raven loops her arm into her elbow before carrying on.

“I had Clarke though. She found me a couple days later,”

“You didn’t tell me it was so soon?”

“I didn’t need to. You were helping,”

“Wait, you’re _the_ Clarke Griffin?” Octavia asks, sitting up straight now.

“Have we met?” Clarke wonders aloud, suddenly feeling like she’s being placed under a microscope.

“You’re the one who slept with Raven’s boyfriend?”

Her tone isn’t accusatory, she’s just stating facts, but Bellamy snorts condescendingly from somewhere to the right of them.

Clarke has to laugh, because that’s what you do to cover up something that’s hurt you.

“The one and only,” she feels herself smirk and Raven nudges her side, strong enough to tip her over if Clarke hadn’t been expecting it.

Bellamy takes a seat near Octavia’s head and looks to Clarke with disdain. She looks straight into his eyes because if she doesn’t, then it’ll be like backing down.

“You’re proud of that?” He asks, incredulous, sneering.

It’s Raven’s turn to snort, but she does it without malice, almost like she sees the humor in it all.

“Nobody could ever be proud of sleeping with Finn Collins,” she laughs, then moves to lie down, using her bag as some sort of pillow.

Bellamy looks confused if anything, probably wondering how two girls can be this okay with each other about something like that. But he doesn’t know that that’s what brought them together in the first place, years ago.

Raven doesn’t look at the man before she continues, already guessing that she should probably elaborate. Clarke doesn’t feel the need to. He can think what he wants about her for all she cares.

“Clarke didn’t know he was _supposed_ to be committed. Still let me hit her though,”

Clarke looks to Octavia, who’s eyes are glistening as she smiles delightedly. It’d be odd to find such amusement in something like that, but Clarke finds it just as funny and grins to herself.

“I thought she should at least have that,”

“Was it hard?”

“I had a black eye for a couple weeks. Wouldn’t be my first though,” she says before she can stop herself.

“Why are you guys going to Vancouver?” Raven asks.

“Our mom is-” Octavia starts, but Bellamy kicks her swiftly in the shin before she can say anything else.

Clarke guesses that it’s probably personal. When isn’t it?

Octavia punches him back in the shoulder, hard enough to leave a bruise and she watches them strangely. They don’t seem like a very conventional couple, not in the slightest.

Raven ignores the domestic and follows up on whatever she’s thinking, like usual.

“Wait, if you guys came from Boston then you must’ve travelled pretty quickly?”

“We had Bell’s truck until Illinois, but we had to ditch it when the battery died,”

“Piece of shit,” Bellamy mutters gruffly to himself.

There isn’t really much else to say, and the sounds of Octavia’s heavy-set breaths begin about fifteen minutes later, followed swiftly by Raven who hums a little in her sleep.

Clarke resists the urge to play with her hair like she does most nights, and stands instead, loading her bow like it’s as natural as, well, breathing. She walks over to a pretty high bush and leans a bit of her weight on it. Only as much as it can take before it starts to lean itself over too.

“What do you think you’re doing?” that rough, throaty voice rings out, making her jump and almost lose her balance.

“What does it look like?” She huffs back. “I always take first watch,”

He looks like he’s about to burst out laughing but there’s no smile in his eyes and he seems deadly in this light.

“You expect me to trust you to watch me sleep?”

“Well, you’re going to have to,”

“No. Not happening. Lie down Princess,”

God, she hates that nickname. Has done since she was a kid when they’d all tease her with it.

“Do not tell me what to do,”

“Or what?”

His eyebrows flick in challenge as he lifts himself to his feet, bringing his gun with him. Clarke wants to laugh- how does he think that pathetic little shotgun is going to intimidate her when she’s been living with Raven’s rifle as a permanent fixture for years? Or her father’s, for that matter.

She takes the arrow that she’s loaded into her bow from its place and starts to twirl it around her fingers like she always does when she needs to think to herself for a moment.

“Let me get this straight,” she says, biting her own tongue to stay calm. “You’re the ones tagging along with us. Not the other way around.”

He bristles and steps closer, lowering his voice. Clarke wonders how his tone is even audible, surely the human ear can’t even hear shit that low down.

“If I had it my way, me and O would be miles away from you,”

She laughs at his empty threat, brushing it off easily.

“Leave then,”

He doesn’t leave. He takes himself back over to where Octavia is sprawled, taking up three people’s worth of space and rests himself next to her, not lying down yet.

“If you try anything, I will shoot you,” His words are dead serious and if looks could kill, Clarke would be dead ten times over. “Don’t think I would hesitate,”

She snorts again.

“That’s smart. Fire that gun and a hundred walkers will come running here as fast as their rotting little legs will carry them. And since you can hardly do it, who’ll be there to protect her?” She asks, smirking, and she knows it’s probably insanely ugly but at this moment, she can’t bring herself to care.

“I can protect my sister,” he says defiantly, suddenly sounding a lot more intimidating and Clarke is knocked back a peg. _Sister._ Maybe that explains the similar features. She laughs at herself for being so close minded but saves it for later- now’s not the time.

“That walker practically had her neck in its teeth when I shot it,” she says, and he growls while she lets the words sink in.

They’re quiet as he lies himself down next to his _sister_ and Clarke doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the night, just watches the arrowhead spin between her fingers for a few hours and refuses to let herself yawn when the sun comes up. Bellamy’s breaths never slow or become louder, so he clearly isn’t sleeping, but she doesn’t expect him to. He’s obviously not going to leave her to look after them any time soon.

 

…

 

Luckily, the sun rises pretty early. Clarke kicks Raven awake to the distorted sound of crows chirping somewhere in the trees. She’s never usually the first one to wake, as she normally takes the second half of the night to sleep, but there was no way she was going to be able to sleep the night before with two strangers by her side.

Raven’s pissed that she didn’t let her take over, but it’s only because Clarke didn’t get any sleep. So she lets her pretend to be mad for as long as she wants to.

Clarke offers out a load of nuts and dried fruit when they set off to walk along more of the cars, and Octavia takes them eagerly, opting to stay next to her while she’s got food in her hands.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to feel clean again,” the younger says quietly, eventually, and Clarke thinks she’s just reaching for a subject that they might be able to talk about, but she appreciates the effort to overcome the awkward silence.

“Preach it,” Raven calls from further ahead, laughing.

“When did you guys find water last?”

“Two days ago, but we’re running low,”

“There might be something in the gas station,” Bellamy chimes, falling behind again.

“You really want to risk it?”

“I’d rather not die of dehydration,”

“I’d rather that than turn into one of those things,” Octavia shudders, and it’s supposed to be a bit of a joke, but Bellamy catches her shoulder, all serious and says low to his sister,

“I’d shoot you before it even comes close to that,”

Clarke wonders when the last time he smiled could have been. She hasn’t seen it yet, can’t imagine what it would look like on his face. She stops trying to picture it when he notices her scrutinizing him.

“I think Bellamy is right- it’s worth a shot,” Raven says, maybe not realizing what’s going on behind her.

“Why don’t you and the Princess cover us while we go in and have a scout,” he says to Octavia.

“You don’t have to do that,”

“We’ll need someone on watch anyway,”

Clarke tries her best to tighten her lips, but she reaches boiling point and snaps before she can help herself.

“I am not just going to sit around and wait for people to do something for me,”

He doesn’t take the bait; he leans in and reaches for the birds’ nest that is her hair, taps on something that sounds like plastic against his nail.

“Really? I thought that was in your nature?”

She doesn’t get what he’s saying until she reaches to her head herself and feels the sharp ridges of the crappy plastic tiara tangled deep into the depths of her curls.

“Well, you thought wrong,” She sulks, pushing at his chest and watching as he lets himself drift backwards from her. Smirk still transparent on his face.

“She’s right Bellamy,” Octavia nudges Clarke’s shoulder in a friendly way when she brushes between the both of them.

He sighs before he continues.

“It’ll be a small space and there’s no need for us to all go in. And it makes sense for someone to stand watch because we don’t want to be trapped if any walkers are outside,”

Although she’s reluctant to admit it, he’s right, and even Raven glances back to tell her she’s being an idiot. So, she does what every mature adult would do in this situation: she pushes past him and huffs loud enough that he definitely hears it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'I am sick of the chase, but I'm hungry for blood,'  
> \- Killer, Phoebe Bridgers


	2. Oh boy, your eyes betray what burns

“Bellamy, I don’t need a babysitter,” Octavia chides, behind Clarke and Raven as their elbows knock.

“I just don’t trust them, O. We need to have an eye on them at all times,”

His sister just laughs at him.

“Bell, you’ve known Raven for ages. You’ve even slept with her for fuck’s sake,”

“We have no idea who she is now. It’s been two years. A lot can change in that time and I’m not risking your life for anyone.”

“Get your head out of your ass, Bellamy,”

Clarke has to hold back a snigger when she overhears their hushed voices, and the respect that she has for the younger sibling grows significantly.

 

…

 

When they reach the gas station, it’s exactly what they expected to see. The building is one story and you could guess the paint was white once upon a time, but now it’s just some sort of dry rot color.

There is a car parked next to a gas pump and one of the tires is flat with a bite mark carved into it, more than one.

Bellamy and Raven head into it wordlessly, while Clarke and Octavia hang about on the corner of the building, with the younger taking to kicking about a fist sized stone. When she kicks it to Clarke, she isn’t quite sure how to respond, so she knocks it back, booting it miles away from where she’s aiming for.

Octavia grins, but she doesn’t run off to go and get it back, just moves to lean against the wall next to Clarke. They’re both looking out into the never-ending highway.

“I’ve never had a Walker that close to me before. Bellamy’s never let me help fight them off unless I’m absolutely necessary, but I… I could feel it breathing behind me,” she whispers, scraping her boot against the ground, after silence has drifted past them patiently. “I didn’t know they could still breathe.”

She sounds oddly vulnerable and it is weird to see that on someone so outwardly fierce, so Clarke stays quiet because she’s not sure that she can be of much help.

“Are you the same age as me?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three,”

“Yeah,” Clarke nods her head, then rubs her shoulder against her neck, as though that will somehow shake the awkward away.

Octavia gets up and sighs, pulling her hands over her face.

“Don’t like waiting around?” Clarke smirks.

“You could say that. I would _kill_ for something sweet right now,” she groans into her palms.

Raven surely won’t mind if she loses a fraction of the chocolate that Clarke scavenged yesterday. What she doesn’t know…

She reaches into her pack and spends a while rooting around for one of the bars, while Octavia spins a pistol around her index finger a bit further out into the road. When she sees the chocolate that Clarke pulls out of her bag, her face lights up and she sprints over, practically jumping on the blonde with more fervor than Clarke has felt in days.

“Where the hell did you get this?”

“Storerooms,” Clarke laughs, and snaps the bar in half, breaking off a square for herself and passing the rest to Octavia.

“Brilliant,”

They’re still nibbling on the small piece of cheap own-brand chocolate when Octavia turns to her fondly, almost calmly.

“Raven talked about you more than anyone else in college. I feel like I know you, but I don’t even know where you’re from,”

And suddenly, maybe just due to the chocolate, Clarke doesn’t mind having this conversation. She doesn’t mind opening up about something beyond the apocalypse. She doesn’t have to think about the words before they are rolling off her tongue.

“My mom grew up in Washington, my dad was from Michigan, but they both moved to New Orleans when my dad got offered a promotion. That’s when they had me,”

“I’ve always wanted to go to New Orleans,” Octavia hums, “I remember being jealous when Raven would tell me stories about growing up there. She’d say that every other house in her street was haunted, so her and her friends would go scouting all the time. And she told me about madrigal- how it lights up the whole city,”

It hurts to hear someone tell Clarke her own childhood memories, but it’s not a bad kind of pain. Maybe she has just been desensitized to sadness.

“That was pretty much it. And beignets. She can’t have left them out. Officially the best hangover food in the world. No argument,”

The brunette laughs but holds her hand up.

“You haven’t tried my mom’s blueberry pancakes. They were like nothing on Earth, ask Bell and he’ll tell you the same thing,”

“Your mom would make you hangover food?” Clarke raises an eyebrow.

“Oh yeah, she’d wait until we were both sober to tear into us. And as soon as my head stopped throbbing, I was grounded for weeks,”

“At least your mom waited until you were sober. I tried to sneak into my room on my friend’s seventeenth and she caught me with one leg in the window and one out. I don’t think my ears ever recovered from all that yelling,”

“That’s harsh,” Octavia says, sucking in breath through her teeth.

“I threw up on her Prada shoes though, so we kind of broke even,”

She laughs absently, somewhere else, picturing it. She holds her hand out to offer another piece.

“I’m good. I only really got it for Raven so we should probably save some,”

“Speak of the devil- “

“And he shall appear,” Bellamy finishes, carrying a few plastic bottles of water in his hands.

“Where’s Raven?” Clarke asks on reflex.

She appears behind his shoulder a moment later with a smug grin on her face.

“There’s more in the bag,” Bellamy says, ignoring her question as he gestures behind him and shoves a bottle in his sister’s hands.

Raven steps up to Clarke and gives her one of the bottles she’s carrying, then nods forward simply.

When they set off again, Octavia doesn’t fall back into step with her brother. Instead, she hangs back to talk to Clarke, which the blonde accepts eagerly, happy to hear more stories that involve her not-so-sober childhood friends.

“My friend, Anya, was one of the more ballsy ones. She’s the girl who helped me sneak out to try a martial arts class a few blocks away. Bell gave me shit about it the day before and convinced my mom to stop me from going. He was practically pacing my door that night to make sure I wouldn’t leave,”

“But you got out anyway?”

“Of course. And I got my black belt three years later. They said I was one of the fastest learners they’d seen- even said I could go pro,”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Couldn’t afford the training. The league weren’t interested in investing in some lowlife from the outskirts of Boston,” she sighs back.

“I think that’s bullshit,” Clarke says intently.

“So did I,”

“O, the Princess isn’t asking for your life story,” Bellamy sulks from up ahead.

God, she’s starting to loathe this guy. For some reason, every word that comes out of his mouth rubs her the wrong way, and he is always wearing the same smug smirk that makes Clarke want to punch him straight in the jaw.

“Maybe I am,” she mutters to herself, but he must overhear.

Either way, he turns and scowls.

“And what gives you the right?”

“Bellamy shut it. You aren’t going to censor what I tell people,” Octavia snaps, and he huffs heavily before he turns back around.

“Sorry about him,” she whispers, once he is out of earshot. “He’s been miserable ever since the outbreak. I get that it’s hard to be happy right now, but he’s not even trying anymore,”

Clarke watches the man in front of her warily, noticing the curl of the hair on the nape of his neck, and thinks about what it might look like if he were to comb his hair down. Bad, she decides.

“It’s fine,”

“No, it’s not. All he cares about anymore is keeping me alive. He isn’t thinking about his own life at all,”

Clarke looks behind to Raven, who is attempting to walk side-ways so that she can keep an eye on the terrain behind them. Maybe she’s starting to understand how desperate Bellamy is to keep his sister alive; she doesn’t know what she’ll do if Raven dies.

There is a moan from the other side of the highway, the road that faces the other way, and Clarke’s head snaps to the sound like she’s a meerkat. There are no bodies visible, but she’s not going to chance it. She pulls Octavia down to the ground and they both crouch awkwardly.

When Raven takes the three more steps needed to catch up with them, Clarke catches her foot and pulls her down to join them without a word. Raven grimaces at the harsh landing and rubs at her ankle, but Clarke has bigger things to worry about. She doesn’t let her eyes stray from where the sound came from.

Something catches her wrist and yanks Clarke up, so that she is standing straight again, and she feels- more than sees- Bellamy’s scowl directed straight at her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asks, seething, but she doesn’t look to him.

“Walker,”

In the next second, Clarke reaches for an arrow and stretches the bowstring tight, pulled back so that it is cutting into her cheek. The arrowhead is just pulling into focus when Bellamy grabs at her elbow and spins her around, too rough.

“If it hasn’t seen us then we need to go,”

“No, wait it out. It might not get anywhere near us, but if we try to run then you know it’ll come after us,”

“Bellamy, she’s right,” Octavia says, leaning her head casually back against a truck tire. “Just sit down.”

“Octavia, I’m not just sitting down and letting the walker come for us. We’re leaving now.”

Raven hisses angrily, “If it does come for us, it’ll be easier to kill it if we’re not running away like idiots. Let it come to us and then we’ve got the control. And for fuck’s sake get down.”

It takes a minute.

“I don’t like this,” he says eventually, practically spitting the words to Clarke. He makes a show of dumping himself down next to his sister.

“Well suck it up: it’s the best we’ve got,” Clarke growls under her breath, and crouches back down so that she can rest against the hood of a car and take aim again.

Before she knows it, Bellamy is nestling himself in next to her with his shotgun following the sight of her arrow.

“What are you doing _now_ , Bellamy?” She asks, almost boiling over with frustration.

“I’m a better shot long range,” it would be a shrug, but he is too tense for that. The set of his shoulders is almost metallic, his posture mechanical. She’s not sure he would even know how to shrug right now.

“Says who?”

“Fuck off, Princess,”

“Both of you shut it. We’ve got more important things to worry about than who’s got the bigger dick,” Raven shout-whispers and Clarke chokes on nothing. She turns around to glare, but Raven sniggers and finishes with, “Metaphorically, obviously.”

Clarke sighs and pushes off the hood.

“Take the shot, Bellamy. Take whatever fucking shot you want,”

He responds by cocking the gun, and Clarke slumps down next to Octavia. The brunette leans her head on to Clarke’s shoulder. She doesn’t really know what to do with the invasion of personal space, so she just sits there and waits, closing her eyes to try to drown out the approaching groans of the infected, and the eventual ricocheting bang of the gun.

As soon as Bellamy shoots it, they don’t wait around; the noise is enough to let any others nearby know that they’re there. And Clarke doesn’t look back to see if he made the shot, because she’s pretty sure the silence clarifies that he did.

 

…

 

It’s raining now. It started about an hour ago. They’ve found cover under a bus shelter, but there is still nowhere dry to sit, and Clarke is afraid her feet are about to turn into ice.

Raven and Octavia left a while ago to find some firewood that isn’t soaked to the bone, but it’s probably going to lead to nothing. Luckily, their bags are waterproof, so they’ve still got clothes that they can change into, but it has been three days since Clarke has felt real, actual warmth and she hopes, naively, that they’ll come back with something.

Bellamy chose to stay behind, and he has placed himself in the opposite corner of the shelter- literally as far away as possible from her. Clarke refuses to look at him, so she doesn’t know what he’s doing, but she tries not to think about it and sets to clean her boots off.

“It’s not a fashion show, Princess,”

Clarke sighs and looks up, simply tired of not being able to catch five minutes of silence.

“Hmm,” she sighs, her voice carrying all of the exhaustion. “I must be confused. Maybe if you weren’t fixing your hair as often as you do, I’d understand my situation,”

She half hopes he won’t hear her sarcasm.

He does hear her, judging by how he tuts his teeth, like he is becoming annoyed with an ungrateful child.

“Aren’t you just hilarious?” he pulls out a knife from his bag to play with in his fingers.

“I try my best,”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Bellamy looks into her eyes for the first time since the night they met, and they are filled with rigid animosity. She doesn’t actually get or remember why she has taken to disliking him so much, but from looking at his expression, she doesn’t really care why.

He just laughs to himself and shakes his head, all faux maturity, all condescension.

Every inch of her skin is crawling, each hair turning over and rubbing the wrong way against the next, and the air that leaves her throat, in as dramatic a sigh as she can fathom, is heated, heavy. It fills the shelter with such density that she can’t stand to be here anymore. She shoves her pack to her side and lifts herself up to her feet, towering over him when she close the space between them.

“Look Bellamy, I get that you don’t like me and trust me, God knows I don’t like you but- “

“Do you think I give a fuck about what you think of me?” he asks, louder, pulling himself up so that she has to look up to talk to him.

He’s not laughing now; no, he looks practically venomous. His head is tilted towards her and he is watching her like he’s torn between hitting her and running away. He doesn’t strike her as the type of person to run away.

“You have got to stop being such a child. Can’t you see that this isn’t a game? We aren’t in a school playground. This is life or death and us hating each other isn’t going to solve anything,” she bristles and pushes forward to shove him in the shoulder. He takes the hit but doesn’t step back or retaliate.

“Take a look at yourself, Princess, before you call me a child,”

“That right there,” she says, snarling, “Exactly what I’m talking about. You haven’t used my name once. I saved your sister’s life and you can’t even muster up the respect to call me by my fucking name?”

Bellamy’s face turns blank when she shouts, spitting in his face, and his demeanor isn’t angry anymore. He looks like he is ready to kill; this is much more intimidating, much more violent than any sarcastic rage could be.

“You think I don’t know that? Well done, Princess. You saved her. You did me a favor and I’ll be in your debt for the rest of my life. Is that what you wanted to hear? Is that what you needed?”

His words are cold and quiet and loom over Clarke like a black cloud; when she looks into his eyes, they are full and bitter.

“What I need,” Clarke whispers into the space between them, her limbs actually numb with frustration. “Is to be able to trust the people I am with. I didn’t save your sister as a favor to you. I shot that walker out of pure instinct, nothing more and nothing less. So if that is what this is all about then you can stop with your pathetic need to be the hero,”

“I don’t want to be the hero,” he says, just as quietly.

But she has had enough and doesn’t look back when she grabs her bow, stalking her way out of the shelter. She doesn’t care where she’s going; she just needs some air to cool off.

Her hair gets wet as soon as she leaves, but the tangles in it are unsalvageable anyway. There is still a crown in there somewhere, but Clarke can’t muster up the effort to take it out. She’ll probably have to cut it out at this rate.

This rain isn’t the kind that falls unnoticeably, like mist that is just a bit more dense, but Clarke has always hated that kind. If it is going to rain, then it may as well be substantial. The rain that you can feel all the way into your blood.

She doesn’t lose sight of the bus shelter as she walks away, but she gets far away enough to be out of earshot. When she reaches the very limit of how much she is willing to chance her luck, Clarke finds she doesn’t really know what to do with herself.

Damn him. Damn him for making her think of _anything_ but this stupid fucking apocalypse. Damn Raven for dragging the both of them into their lives, when they are strangers, when trust is a myth in these times.

Then she spirals.

Damn Wells for even moving to Vancouver in the first place. Who the hell goes all that way just for medical school? She’d stayed in New Orleans for it hadn’t she? Granted it hadn’t been a choice, but she still stayed. Now look at her, running all the way across America just to grasp at any strand of family she has left. Damn him. Because she doesn’t even know if he’s alive anymore.

Damn her father for leaving her before this shit even started, the one person who would have given her the confidence, who she would have given the trust, to stay alive.

Damn her mother for what they lost, for what they never had the chance to lose. Damn her and damn the lot of them.

She wants to shout, but she knows that she can’t because that’d be a rookie mistake, and she has learnt her lesson over and over already. She won’t cry either because she is stronger than that. She can hold herself strong when things are starting to fall. Crying feels like a distant memory.

Clarke looks down to her thumb, the one she cut in the mall a couple of days ago, and traces her index finger along the line of crusted dried blood. It is still red and bright, so she holds it to her lips to taste the iron in it.

_Damn you, Clarke. Damn you for sticking around._

She sits down on to the curb of the road and crouches on her knees. She’d be praying if she didn’t so adamantly believe that there is no-one out there to listen.

No praying. She should go back.

Clarke looks to see Octavia and Raven return; they’re setting about to create a fire. They must have found something. It’s still raining and every part of her is wet, down to her bones, but she tips her head up to taste the rain and it is salty on her tongue.

Clarke zips up the thin material of her jacket, as though the fastening can somehow make her pull herself together.

She takes an arrow from its sheath before she turns to go back, but doesn’t place it into its rest. Instead, she lets it turn around her fingers that rest by her side while she takes each step forward.

Head up. Let the rain fall straight through her.

There aren’t any flames yet, but they have managed to pile some, quite frankly pathetic, sticks into some sort of pyramid that are resting against each other in a delicate equilibrium.

Octavia is snapping some stones together in a way that Clarke’s father used to do, and Raven’s got her head to the ground, eye level with the base of the mountain so that she can blow softly into its heart.

They aren’t getting anywhere.

Bellamy is sat in the corner still, now using his knife to carve up a pretty large log into wood shavings that they can use for tinder, and he is catching them into a sock that looks like it has seen better days.

When Clarke gets back undercover, Octavia starts to smash the stones together violently, which clearly doesn’t help her get anywhere with creating sparks.

Clarke walks over to them wordlessly and takes the log from Bellamy. She also takes the knife out of his hand and the collection of wood shavings and sets about to carve out a hole in the small stump of wood.

Once there’s a tube-like hole in the log, she pours some of the tinder into it and reaches for one of the few pieces of kindling that they have found. It takes a while to get anywhere with rubbing the kindling against the inside of the hole but eventually, the friction causes the wood to start smoking, and Raven hustles over to help let the fire grow.

“Where’d you even find dry wood?”

Raven doesn’t look up from the pile, but she does answer with a lightness in her tone now that they have warmth.

“There were a few fallen trees that covered some of this,” she says, picking through the flames.

“Bellamy come over and warm up,” Octavia calls, and gestures to her brother once she has sat down opposite Clarke and Raven.

“I’m good,”

“Bellamy,”

The sternness in her voice is unmistakable and he doesn’t have to be told twice before he stands to his feet and takes the few steps over to the small fire, slumping down next to Raven and his sister without grace. He’s opposite Clarke but he is avoiding eye contact, so she can’t get a read on him.

“Now all we need is some marshmallows and a good campfire song, and we might be able to pretend this is fun,” he sulks.

Clarke watches as the fire casts shadows on his face, causing the leather of his skin to flicker and change shade ominously.

“Shame, I should have packed my guitar. I knew I’d forgotten something,” Clarke says sullenly to the center of the fire.

They’re all quiet for a moment. Entranced by the way the flames seem to be consuming themselves. Beautifully cannibalistic.

“Where even are we?”

“We must have hit Kansas by now,”

“Not long from Nebraska,” Raven says warily.

“What’s in Nebraska?” Octavia asks.

“There’s supposed to be a safehouse. I think it’s one of the only ones in the U.S. We’re gonna see if we can restock on some supplies, maybe find some sort of soap-”

“Nebraska is gone,” Bellamy interrupts her. His tone is sinister, ungentle. It is the opposite of passive.

“How do you know that?”

Octavia is the one to speak up, whispering to her feet, propped up to the fire. “We spent ages trying to get Bell’s radio to tune in to anything. It took a few weeks, but we found the broadcast system eventually,” she lifts her head to look at Clarke. “Nebraska got infected. There’s no-one left,”

Clarke doesn’t really know what to say to that. Raven sighs heavily, like she’d been expecting that all along.

“If Nebraska got infected so easily…” Clarke starts, but she doesn’t finish. She can’t speak it into reality. Make it an actual possibility.

“Then how do we know Vancouver is safe?” Bellamy asks. Clarke looks up to see him watching her carefully over the smoke and the pyramid of flames. He doesn’t look angry anymore, he just looks so tired. So done with it all. It’s… familiar.

“We don’t.” Raven answers flat, but then she looks to Clarke with orange dancing in her eyes and she sees hope flicker somewhere in those depths. “We don’t know anything. But I’ll be damned if I don’t at least try and find a way to survive. That’s what this is all about, right? This is how we survive,”

Clarke tries to ignore the break in her voice when she answers her, but her throat feels raw and she’s not sure she can help it. “Maybe life should be about more than just surviving,”

Nobody else says anything again for some time. Clarke can feel heat on her face that she knows isn’t coming from the fire. Bellamy’s eyes are burning a hole straight through her head, even if she can’t see it. She can feel it. He is looking at her with so much curiosity that she feels like she might burst into flames. She wonders if he could do that. If his focus is enough to make fire. Hers is, clearly. They have her fire here in front of them, but where’s his?

Clarke takes a shaky breath, then something from inside of her pack tugs at her, reminds her that it is there. She reaches for it and brings it into her body, then begins to root around inside for the bottle that she’d hastily stuffed in.

“Where the fuck did you get that?” Raven squeals, ripping the whiskey bottle from her hands.

“Found it in one of the boxes in the storeroom,” Clarke leans on her bag, using it as a pillow.

“Amazing,” Octavia laughs. She reaches over the fire to grab at it.

Bellamy looks unconvinced at first, but even he can’t hold back the smallest of smiles at the sight of the liquor in his sister’s hands.

“It’s probably not a good idea,”

“Who says?” she doesn’t even bother looking at him, instead focused on breaking the seal with a snap.

“You really want to be pissed when we run in to the next horde?”

Octavia doesn’t answer, she just leans into him and takes a large swig from the bottle. Raven snickers delightedly at the scowl on her face when she has to wince at the sour taste.

She easily passes the bottle back. Clarke doesn’t hesitate before she brings the cold glass up to her lips, barely flinching when her throat starts to burn.

Selfishly, but not unreasonably, she keeps a hold of the bottle so that she can have another shot before she passes it over to Raven, glowing with the warmth of the whiskey.

“I think I could die happy now,” Octavia smirks to herself.

Raven hums back through the bottle. Clarke tries not to laugh. Maybe the lack of alcohol she’s consumed over the past few months has made her a lightweight. She has always been one though; Wells would constantly tease her about how easy it was for her to get way past tipsy.

Bellamy takes the bottle from Raven’s hand and drinks some for himself, downing at least a quarter of the bottle in one.

“Woah take it easy there,” Raven chimes and reaches slightly to take it back.

But Bellamy leans forward to his knees and stretches over the fire to give it to Clarke. He smiles weakly, and Clarke can’t help but think he looks almost like he is in pain.

“Truce?” he mutters, refusing to make eye contact with her.

Maybe it is the fresh fizz of the alcohol in her body, or the way all of his hair is sticking up at different angles, but she smiles back, taking the bottle and raising it to him as he sits back down.

“Truce,” Clarke mouths, and hopes Raven and Octavia don’t notice.

Raven is asking Octavia a question, but Clarke misses it, so she turns to look out of the shelter, leaning on to the edge of the entryway. It feels like the rain is starting to stop now, but she still watches as it falls through the leaves of nearby trees.

It’s nice to just breathe for a moment. Strange given the circumstances, but it is nice, and reminds her of what it would feel like to get tipsy with Wells after a particularly taxing benefit party, to climb up to the roof of her house to watch the stars.

She can’t see them tonight, but the thought is still there. And the rain is there too.

“Clarke?” Raven’s voice sounds from the fireplace; they’re all looking to her expectantly.

“What?” she asks, feeling guilty for some reason.

“Octavia asked why we’re going to Vancouver. Maybe you should be the one to tell her,”

“Sure,” Clarke nods, finally admitting to herself that she’s going to have to explain herself at some point. It might as well be at a time when they are all feeling moderately content. She takes the place she’d been sitting in before, and looks to the bottle in Octavia’s hand before she starts. It’s almost empty already.

“I practically grew up with this guy that lived next door to me. His parents were friends with mine and we both came from quite wealthy families, so it was just… natural. He was the kind of guy that would help sneak me out of shitty events that my parents dragged me to, or would go to the store to get me emergency tampons. Just always there. We both went to undergrad in Stanford, but I had to come home for my post grad and Wells got in to UBC. He wanted a fresh start and I… couldn’t,”

They don’t question why she couldn’t go. Which is a good thing because she wouldn’t be able to tell them what happened to her father that year.

“So now he’s in Vancouver, which is probably the best alternative because it’s one of the only safehouses left, but he is basically the only family I have and…” she trails off, unsure as to how to explain just how much she needs him.

“He must be pretty special for you to travel across the country for,” Octavia hums, just thinking to herself and probably not trying to make it sound like there is any other meaning to it.

“Wells is awesome,” Raven intervenes, noticing Clarke’s reluctance to answer. “He beat up Clarke’s first boyfriend when he found out he was only using her for S.A.T. answers. And then he didn’t even get pissed at us for stumbling through his door at three a.m. completely out of our heads,”

Octavia laughs before she answers.

“That’s what Bellamy was like. He made me sneak around the fire escape so our Mom wouldn’t see, and then he stayed with me until I’d downed like a liter of water,”

Bellamy shifts, clearly uncomfortable, and Clarke looks to him, smiling inwardly at how awkward he is acting about being praised.

“Don’t think for a second I didn’t tell Mom,” he says gruffly.

His sister rolls her eyes, always fond, and Clarke takes another drink, forcing her shoulders back so that she has more of a chance at relaxing.

“So, did you two meet through Collins?” he asks out of nowhere, wincing a bit as though he is cringing at his own question. She might be the only one of them to pick up on his little giveaways, his delicacies. She stores them away, the fragile narrowing of his eyes, the way he rubs his ear against his shoulder moments later.

“We were at the same high school anyway, so we’d always been aware of each other, but we became friends straight after him,” Raven nods, kicking the fire with her boot.

Clarke doesn’t mention the fact that it was Wells who encouraged her to get closer to Raven. Nor the fact that Clarke had teased him constantly about his more than obvious crush on her; the one that never quite went away.

Not that there is time to think about things like that anymore.

Her eyes flick to Bellamy’s once more; they have warmed considerably since the fire started. She wants to let him know that he is allowed to smile. It’s not a crime. They aren’t going to sacrifice him for the ultimate sin of pretending that he might not die tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. Because he looks like he so wants to.

“We could use a radio,” Clarke thinks outwardly.

“It was a piece of shit. We could barely get a signal with it,” Octavia shrugs.

“Still… it’d be nice to have,”

“I miss meat,”

“You what?” Raven’s head shoots up.

“We haven’t had real meat in forever,” Octavia says.

“How have you been surviving?”

“Bellamy was training in the military when the infection started- “

“You were?” Clarke interrupts, unable to stop herself.

“I was, yeah,”

His shoulders shift awkwardly again, so Clarke doesn’t press the subject.

“My father was in the military,” she whispers, only to herself, regardless of if he can hear it or not. Then she turns to Octavia and tries to pretend the moment never happened. “Sorry, you were saying?”

“He’s learnt the basics of fieldcraft, so we’ve practically been living like veggies,”

“You haven’t hunted because of the sound?” Clarke guesses, having picked up on the fact that the only weapons they’ve got are a crappy penknife, a pistol, and a shotgun.

Sometimes she forgets how lucky she is to have had hunting experience before, with something that doesn’t let everyone nearby know what she’s doing.

“I can take you tomorrow,” she offers through the haze of alcohol, knowing she wouldn’t normally if she were one hundred percent sober.

“You’d do that?” Octavia asks, clearly surprised and somewhat taken aback.

“Sure. I tried teaching Raven how to shoot once but she was God awful,”

She’s reaching that level where her muted southern accent is starting to immerge, in all of its refined awkwardness. She had only half developed it because her parents weren’t from New Orleans, but when she started coming home from school with that southern twang, her mother had cringed and sulked for hours, moaning about how her daughter was starting to sound like a hick.

It always came out when she went hunting with her father too, for some reason. Maybe because that was the only time her mother wasn’t around.

“Hey, that’s just because I’m used to shooting like a normal person,”

“Yes, but isn’t a bow so much more elegant?” Clarke jokes, her tone laced with sarcasm as she takes on her mother’s clipped-nose dialect, something so isolated from her own now.

Bellamy makes a sound low in his throat and he wriggles where he’s sat. Maybe he didn’t get it?

“Careful, Griffin. You wouldn’t want me to snap that thing in two,” Raven smirks.

“You wouldn’t dare,”

Clarke still clutches the bow to her chest, letting the bowstring rest across her shoulder like it always does when she’s not using it.

They don’t stay up for much longer, and this time, when Bellamy asks her if he can take the first watch because he’s just not tired, she doesn’t put up a fight.

 

…

 

Like all diamonds that emerge from the coal filled trenches, that moment of glistening ease was a rarity. She should have known this. She shouldn’t have been so childish to assume that this might be how things can proceed.

But she wakes to an empty glass bottle, a sour breath, and an aching back against sodden concrete. The fire has long since been extinguished and there is mist in the air. No, it is thicker than mist. They are shrouded in fog, which is more than dangerous. Clarke can no longer see the place she’d walked to last night to take a breather; she can’t even see five feet in front of her.

The clouds run through to the bus shelter like hands creeping in to reach out, long pointed fingers that make Clarke feel like she’s exposed.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” she asks Bellamy, who is the only one up.

He looks like he has been up for hours, sat awkwardly on his seventy-liter bag- only half filled with all of his stuff- rolling his fingers around themselves like he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“You were sleeping,” he shrugs, like it’s obvious.

“You can’t take watch all night. That’s not how it works,”

“You did it the night before,”

“That’s different,” Clarke mutters, but knows she hasn’t made a convincing job of her defense when she sees his chiding smirk. “What’ve you been doing?”

“Nothing,” he says gruffly, his head hanging low. He’s clearly hiding something, but Clarke doesn’t push it. He’s always hiding something. Their secrets are the only things they have to themselves now.

“We’re going to have to be careful today. The fog is a risk,”

“Yeah,” silence, “No shit,” his smile is so small that it’s barely there.

Clarke smiles back, shyly, and meets his eyes. They look warm, like last night, and they’re glowing with unspoken words, ones she can’t even begin to guess.

Raven stirs in her sleep and rolls over. Clarke looks to her and scrambles to save her head because it is just about to fall from the bag that she is using as a pillow. She crawls over but she’s too late, as Raven’s head crashes to the concrete ground with a thunk.

Bellamy winces, but doesn’t say anything as Raven jumps to sit up, suddenly awake and alert. She is looking for her gun, already panicking because she can’t find it.

Clarke does the only thing she can think of doing and catches both of Raven’s cheeks in her hands, forcing the brunette to look her in the eye. Hers are wild and transparently frightened, the remnants of a nightmare captured in them.

Clarke runs her hand down her face, desperate to get her to calm down.

“It was a dream, Rae. It was a dream,” she whispers, holding her head up, because she knows she might go limp if she doesn’t.

It takes a bit longer for Raven to realize her surroundings, and Clarke sees her droop with relief, the lids of her eyes closing over subconsciously.

“You’re okay, you’re good, you’re safe,” she coos over and over, thinking it’s the only thing she can do. It’s a lie, and she feels guilty for telling her friend something so untrue, but it’s the only thing she knows to do.

“Clarke,” Raven breathes, and shakes her head softly before collapsing into her arms, embracing her tightly. Clarke returns it upon reflex.

Raven is warm in her arms but that has never been surprising; Clarke runs cold and always has.

She peers over Raven’s shoulder, looks to see Bellamy watching them curiously. Well, watching her. His eyes drop as soon as Clarke meets his gaze- his ears turning pink beneath that military cut, and she stores that little thing too. Notes it down for later.

She doesn’t take her eyes off him and when he raises his head once more, clearly expecting her to be preoccupied with something else, his gaze falls back to her face again.

Clarke doesn’t save the blush that spreads to his cheeks this time, instead she lets herself smile outwardly, grinning widely at his embarrassment. He looks like a schoolboy, like they are kids across the class getting caught.  

She gets to smile like this very rarely. But it feels good to be happy.

Clarke flashes her eyebrows at him. He drops his head; she can faintly see him smiling but doesn’t understand why he is trying to hide it. It really is like he’s ashamed.

Raven pulls back a bit, her pupils still blown wide, but she looks a lot more at peace than she did moments ago.

“Sorry,” she mutters, guilt-ridden. Clarke just shakes her head and reaches for Raven’s bag. She searches through it to find something to eat and gets some sort of stale snack bar. It’ll have to do. She puts it into Raven’s hands then turns to look through her own.

“Who wants to be the one to wake Octavia?” Raven asks, later, once her pathetic excuse of a breakfast has been eaten.

“I’ll pass,” Bellamy decides.

“Why not?” Clarke asks, wondering.

“You haven’t seen O when she wakes up. You wouldn’t tell the difference between her and a walker from a mile off,”

“That’s got to be an exaggeration,” Clarke laughs, packing up her gear slowly.

Turns out it’s not an exaggeration, as she finds out five minutes later when Octavia throws her boot at Raven’s head aggressively. Thank God for the reflexes of Raven Reyes.

 

…

 

“I don’t like this,” Bellamy says quietly when they set off along the tree line of the highway, weaving between the road and the forest floor. It’s odd how easily the vegetation has learnt to grow within the past few months, subtly but there more than she has ever seen it.

Still, they can’t see ahead, and the fog is only coming in thicker, heavier blankets upon heavier blankets.

“Staring at it isn’t going to make it drift away,” Clarke smirks, following what she can see in the corner of her eye.

“It might,”

He swings around a thin tree trunk clumsily, and bumps into Clarke on the way round, jostling her over. She gives him a look and he nods an awkward apology. There’s that masked smile again, always just beneath the surface of his face: transparent in his eyes.

“Bell, watch where you’re going, you idiot,” his sister taunts from behind them.

“I was,”

“Sure you were,” Raven laughs in turn, but she is cut off when Clarke hears something and whirls around.

There it is, that teasing sound of flowing water, ambient but present, like gunfire. It can’t be more than a mile away if it’s that loud, but there’s no way to know which way to go through this fog.

The others all hear it a few moments later. Before Clarke can comprehend what’s happening, Octavia has torn off.

“Octavia!”

The tone of Bellamy’s voice says more than any words ever could and Clarke looks to him worriedly, taking in the panic in his face.

Raven starts to run after his sister and they don’t really have much choice but to take after the two of them, Bellamy hot on Clarke’s heels and Clarke hot on Raven’s.

Their sprint, however, only lasts about a minute because. Without any warning, they all land in a heap on the grass-bed. Octavia must have stopped, or slowed, and Raven must have collided into her at full force… and that just leads to Clarke falling on top of them and unfortunately, Bellamy falling on to Clarke.

They’re left sprawled out in some sort of human mountain, all groaning and rolling to get free, which only makes things worse, tangling legs into tighter knots.

It only hits Clarke, moments later when they all seem to reach a mutual agreement to stop squirming, that Bellamy’s body is weighted heavily on top of hers so that they are face to face, breathing in each other’s deep breaths. She certainly hasn’t been this close to anyone, let alone him, in a very long time. It makes her freeze up, because she is worried that if she makes any sort of movement while she’s this close to someone else, then she’ll crumble.

They are both panting thanks to the struggle, and Clarke watches as the realization of their proximity dawns on his face. Her cheeks heat up way too fast. Before she can be ashamed of her blush, Clarke sees Bellamy’s ears turn just as pink as it spreads through his neck.

Raven and Octavia are no longer beneath them. Somehow, they must have crawled free, but Clarke is frozen, pushed against the ground by his body. She feels the girls in her periphery and knows that they are still laid down, but she can’t dare break eye contact with Bellamy, because it feels, unreasonably, like a challenge. Of course, she’d turn it into a competition.

They both stay, wordlessly searching each other’s eyes as though they’re looking for something that either one can recognize. And time is passing, slower than it has in so long, and nothing is happening through these stilling seconds. Nothing but flittering eyes, ragged breathing, and the beating of something sort of intrinsic. Time passes, and Bellamy’s breaths are no longer deep and restless, but they don’t get any less shaky. He sounds nervous.

Clarke holds her own so as not to give away her own nerves, but she feels her fingertips start to shake like they always do when she’s on edge. It is her giveaway. Her tic.

The curls that frame his face have fallen down and are brushing against her own hair. It feels weirdly intimate; Clarke wishes she could see what their intertwined curls look like. Black against blonde. Dark touching light. Shadows that live under the sun.

His skin, from this close, looks tough, and he looks not old, but weary. She wonders how old he actually is. The sound of his breathing is too delicate for her to interrupt.

He is still looking at her strangely and he has propped himself up, so that she isn’t being crushed anymore, but he hasn’t pushed himself up any more than that.

_What are you looking for, Bellamy?_

There can’t be more than a few inches between the tips of their noses, and that is enough for Clarke to be able to taste his breath. It is like honey, and whiskey, and something else, something… addictive.

Someone clears their throat from a few steps away, Clarke cranes her head to look to the source of the noise. Her chin is pushed upwards, and everything appears upside down now. Bellamy looks up too, but it only closes the space between their faces, so close that their chins bump awkwardly.

There is scratchy stubble lining his skin, it feels nice against the smooth porcelain of her own. Octavia is standing above them, not quite smirking because she looks too happy for that.

And the moment, whatever it was, is broken.

Bellamy scrambles to lift himself up, standing and brushing off the leaves on his pants before he holds a hand out and heaves Clarke to her feet, so strong that she doesn’t have time to think before she is upright, having made no effort to pull herself up.

“O, what the fuck do you think you’re doing running off like that?” his voice booms through the foliage. Clarke jumps because of how close they still are. He wasn’t this angry before, and he looks a little more than shaken up. Clarke guesses he’s still rattled from their fall.

“Don’t yell at me just because you got caught,” she chimes, smirking cheekily, and he strides over to grab her by the arm. He pulls her away, out of earshot but still within sight, and Clarke walks over to Raven, feeling uncomfortable.

They both share a glance, then crane to listen to their argument, acting like children trying to overhear their parents’ hushed yet angry voices.

“Caught doing what?” he is whispering, raging.

“You know what Bell,” Octavia’s trying not to laugh now.

“O, I was worried. How could you be so stupid?”

“I got excited. I forgot about the fog and I’m sorry Bellamy,” she deadpans, doesn’t sound like she means a word of it. “Now can we talk about what just happened between you and-”

“Nothing happened,”

“It didn’t look like nothing,”

“Leave it, Octavia,”

She learns to shut up immediately. Maybe that’s the line, that’s where she knows when to stop. When he uses her birth name and not just their epithets.

Clarke turns back to Raven, but there is no comradery smile, instead Raven’s got that glint in her eye like she knows something that Clarke doesn’t.

And then there is a crash through the leaves, not building and subtle, nothing like oncoming wind, but sudden and violent. Too sudden to be any sort of animal. And too violent to just be one.

It is such opaque mist, and Clarke can’t see five feet in front of her. She looks to the others, who are already starting to be carried off into the low hanging clouds and, with Raven, she runs to them and clutches one of Octavia’s shoulders out of instinct.

This is how it always happens. Walkers are always heard before they’re seen, the desperate groans are too distinct not to hear. But they are surrounded by distorted grumbles that echo each other as though they’re bouncing around the edges of a cave. More than one. More than two. More. More. More.

She has encountered about ten surprise attacks in the past seventy days. Which obviously doesn’t sound like a lot, but a lot of the time they have been able to eliminate the walkers before they have even been noticed.

Getting out of that alive feels a lot like passing an exam, like getting result from hard work and logic.

But the attacks, like the one in the mall a few days ago, are the type that send all logic out of the window, all ability to process in the trash. And the only things these encounters leave behind are the pure and unadulterated instinct that runs through her veins like heightened adrenaline.

Clarke loads her bow, not really noticing that she has done it, and looks to the others. She doesn’t reveal her own fear; this isn’t the time for that.

She looks to Bellamy as an afterthought: his expression has been schooled to neutrality out of practice, and yet there is just that something in his eyes. That something, pleading for help.

She turns away and takes aim, pointing an arrow to the middle of nowhere as if that might achieve something. The noises are closing in, and it is hard not to mix them all together when they are coming from everywhere.

A shoulder nudges hers: the group has turned, back to back as though protecting some pot of gold in the center of their bodies, all raising their respective weapons.

A wave of guilt overcomes her suddenly, and she looks to the guns that they are holding. She isn’t a caveman for using her bow, surely. She can fire just as quickly and with more than accurate aim, yet there is something so infantile about holding something she used to consider a childhood hobby in her hands as a last shred of protection. There will be time to spiral about this later. Now she needs to survive.

No time to run. They’re going to have to stay and fight this one out.

She releases the end of her arrow into the direction of a nearby sound and hears it hit flesh, tearing through chunks of spinal cord. It acts as the signal for the others to start shooting, loud ricochets of bullets tumbling through the fog.

She keeps shooting too, but something grasps her ankle, the one she’s leaning forward on to balance her guard, and her feet are pulled out from under her. The group have spread now, becoming more at ease with the sightless defense; she is far enough away from the others to not be able to stabilize herself.

Clarke knows that she’s in trouble when she smells the stomach-churning stench of rotting skin and bones and sour flesh. There is something breathing raggedly on the ground near her- it must have been hit to the floor.

The walker- once a middle-aged woman with greying shadow black hair and wearing a pair of spectacles that are losing a lens, the other smashed to crystals- is clumsily climbing up Clarke’s body, and she knows she has to do something and do it fast. Once it realizes that it has easy access to her own tissue, it won’t hesitate to take a bite.

She kicks it in the face with her walking boot as hard as she can, and she almost vomits when she feels the skull crush under her feet, denting like a thin sheet of plastic. It recovers concerningly quickly and begins to throw itself over her. Clarke manages to hold her arms up and keep it at armlength while it chomps, teeth shattering, on thin air.

There are more feet stumbling around her; Clarke thanks the cover of the walker and the fog because otherwise she’d be done for. But there isn’t long before her arms weaken under the dead weight.

“Clarke!” she hears Raven’s voice from somewhere, almost completely out of breath.

Clarke can’t see her, or either of the Blakes, but she can’t take her eyes off the walker that is choosing to target her cheeks, letting its neck hang, detached slightly to get its mouth closer. There is a bullet hole in the side of its face, and it has skimmed the edge of its head. Clarke doesn’t let herself shout back: then she’ll run the risk of giving herself away.

“Octavia!” Bellamy yells through the clearing, his voice is getting further away. “We can’t.”

“Really Bellamy? Now?” His sister shouts back, sounding incredulous, but Clarke doesn’t take the time to wonder what they’re discussing because the dead woman is still clawing at her face. “Clarke!”

“Raven!” Clarke lets herself scream now; she’s verging on desperate.

Their voices are only getting further away, maybe they’re being pushed back. The walkers’ steps are only becoming more and more fervent around her.

“Octavia, we can’t wait up,”

“Bellamy shut up!” Octavia shouts, but she is getting fainter and she is barely audible anymore. “She’d save me.” she says when there isn’t a reply. “Clarke would save me.”

“She’ll catch up. She’s smart and there is no way I’m risking your life,” he sounds frustrated, but Clarke’s blood burns.

“If you think for a second that I’m leaving her, then you’re miles off,” Raven’s scold is hoarse and wet over the storm of moans.

“Take a listen, Reyes. I can’t hear her, can you?” his has only turned cold and bitter, barely recognizable from the warmth of his voice from this morning.

Then it sinks in. She can’t rely on them, and if she wants to get out of this, to survive, then she will have to do this on her own. If she says anything now, then Raven will make them wait up, and that’ll only put them in more danger. Let them go. Let them think she’s dead.

Clarke shifts one of her hands to wrap itself around the walker’s neck, to keep it elevated while she reaches around behind her neck to grab at an arrow. Only using one hand to keep it balanced tears muscles and they both wobble through the pivot of her wrist. It almost manages to overpower her when it realizes it has its own, while limp and heavy, arms that it can fight back with, but Clarke has always been quick when she’s got an arrow in her fingers.

She plunges it through the center of its neck, then viciously tears it through to the other side, so she can see the hilt of it on the other end. As one final act of reassurance, Clarke rips it to the side and watches as its partially dismembered head rolls around to the side and hangs limp while its eyes fade to deaden even more.

There are still dead bodies moving around her, searching for something warm but not being able to find prey in the thick blanket of mist, so Clarke pulls the carcass over her for cover. She tries desperately to stabilize her breath, but can feel how staggered and panicked it is, adrenaline rushing out like waterfalls.

She has to move. No-one has ever survived a stampede by laying down and waiting for it to end.

Clarke heaves herself up, blood still rushing through her veins, and brings the body up with her. The weight drags her down, but it is her only cover. She is surrounded by walkers, all jostling and wandering aimlessly, and her shoulder nudges dozens of others in the sardine can of fog. They could see her at any moment, so she forces a dramatic limp and leans the beheaded walker over her shoulders, stepping with the body.

She trips at one point, over the dislodged ankle of her prop, but it only really adds to the act and she plays it off by subtly speeding up. It’s terrifying; like moving through the heart of an enemy warzone with only the disguise of striped war paint.

Soon enough, the walkers start to dissipate, scattering into thin air as Clarke reaches the clearing.

She ditches the shell of what was once something so alive, and almost retches because of her own smell but carries on, blanking out the remaining involuntary noises of the stragglers and focusing on the sound of running water nearby. That’s where they’ll be headed, they have to be.

Clarke just prays to God that they didn’t hang back and wait for her.

She stumbles for a while longer, probably about half an hour, but she reaches a new clearing after some time, and the sound of the river amplifies. She can’t see the water’s edge through the fog, but she keeps tumbling forward in the search.

It is heaven when she finds it. She falls face first into the cold, rushing current and hangs off the riverbank to drink what she can. It _should_ be clean and, right now, she honestly doesn’t care.

Then voices erupt from somewhere downstream; Clarke’s head shoots up to crane her ears. Whatever they’re saying, they’re definitely angry, and the words are too distinct to just be the effortless moans of a walker. It is difficult to distinguish what they’re saying over the sound of the river, so Clarke crawls on her hands and knees towards the sound, unable to lift herself any further.

“Raven, you don’t mean that,” Octavia’s melodic voice turns flat.

“I want…. gone” Raven sounds cold, systematic, like she is feeling nothing. Clarke knows that that is when she’s broken, because that is how they both cope with loss. That is how they know they’ve reached their lowest point, because there is no emotion there anymore. Nothing left to feel.

Clarke is still crawling because her legs have numbed to ice.

“You’re killing her, Bellamy. You know that right?” Raven raises her voice a bit, and Clarke is getting closer and closer, not letting herself really process the conversation because she’s worried what she’ll start to think if she does.

“She would have wanted you both alive,” he deadpans.

“You don’t get to decide that,”

Clarke pulls herself up to her feet, driven by what can only be adrenaline and stumbles forward, staggering. She has to crawl through a shrub that blocks the path of the riverbank and she retches up what little breakfast she had this morning when she passes by a putrid, rotting squirrel, dry heaving when there is nothing left in her stomach to throw up. She can’t be more than a few hundred feet away from them. Clarke thinks that that makes her safe enough. She can rest for a few minutes, can’t she? They might stay here for a while, and she can find them in an hour or so. She’s just so tired, so done.

No. No. Clarke is stronger than this. She needs to prove that she is stronger than this, to all of them and, more importantly, to herself.

Clarke pulls herself back to her feet with a groan, then takes a minute to let her vision focus, let her brain clear itself, and let her thoughts arrange into that same survival mode.

There is an arrow in its rest before she realizes, and her boots have shifted forward without her knowledge. She can do this. _Take aim and look after yourself_.

She breaks through the bush and sees the hazy silhouettes of figures beyond the skyline of the fog, so she stumbles forward towards them, and then halts to a stop as she counts them. One, two, three… four.

The thoughts evaporate like the layers of vapor that line the forest floor and Clarke sprints forward, no longer staggered or clumsy, but refined once more, because now that is what she needs to be. A soldier.

When she manages to reach a point where she can distinguish the features of each member of the party, Clarke feels ready to drop to the floor once more, but she stills and leans her weight forward like she is so used to doing. Once she shifts her fingers, the bowstring flings back into place and the arrow sails through the mist, narrowly dodging the throat of a long-haired brunette and passing through the air to hit the towering, tilted figure behind her. It staggers backward before falling limp to the ground.

Clarke doesn’t think she’s quite visible yet, because the others look to the walker, speechless, and it takes Raven traipsing over to the cadaver to check out what just saved Octavia’s life to find out what it was.

She takes the arrow out of its neck, holds it in her hands like she would a diamond, before throwing it over to Octavia for closer inspection. She has a similar reaction: they both look to each other, like they’re in awe, before they start looking around frantically.

That is all it takes for Clarke to wake up again, to take a few more steps forward, exposing herself, like she is standing in a spotlight.

It’s not Raven who she looks to- she can already predict the relief on her face. She doesn’t look at Octavia either, because there is no way she can picture her expression and Clarke is ever so slightly afraid of what she might see.

No, she wants to stare straight into Bellamy’s eyes. She wants to find the guilt within them and burn in it so that maybe, it might just be enough to find some kind of warmth. She wants to see his mistakes and make them naked, so that he will know just how ashamed she wants him to feel.

He doesn’t meet her gaze, understandably so, but she fights to hold it, shooting lasers from her eyes like the arrows that she knows so well.

Something weighted and heavy lands on her chest, and Clarke turns her head to become smothered in dark- almost shadow tinted- hair. It’s Octavia, not Raven. She can tell because Raven always wears hers up in a tight ponytail, but the silky strands that shroud her face are free and flowing carelessly, knotless and fresh; like the sweat within her roots is some sort of hydrant.

“How the fuck are you alive?” Octavia whispers in her ear.

“I don’t really know,” Clarke answers, honest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Oh boy, you eyes betray what burns,'  
> \- I Love You, Woodkid


	3. He held her hand, like it was a mystery

Raven jumps on them both next, landing on the other side of her and wrapping her arms around the two of them. Clarke knows she smells disgusting thanks to the Walker that had no reception of personal space, but they don’t seem to mind. She also takes into consideration the state of her hair and how it is matted with all sorts of brambles and mud and blood and God knows what else. Clarke thinks it’s reaching down to the end of her rib cage with tinted curls but again, they don’t seem to care about that either.

Raven doesn’t say anything, but Clarke doesn’t expect her to.

Bellamy has taken a few steps back so that he’s leaning against the spinney trunk of a tree and he’s flipping a knife between his fingers as something to do. Coward.

Clarke’s knees go weak and her ankles droop out from under her, but her friends’ arms are wrapped around her torso practically keeping her up. She’s afraid if they take their arms away, she’ll just collapse into a pile of skin and dislodged bones and a skull that doesn’t feel connected to anything else in her body.

“We found the water,” Raven mumbles to Clarke’s shoulder. “You want to get cleaned up?”

“I don’t think I could smell worse if I tried,”

It breaks the tension because Octavia breathes a laugh into her hair, and she feels Raven smile shyly. She tries to school her expression into something calm and easy but it’s pretty hard and she thinks her smile looks broken.

“Come with me,”

Raven takes her hand and leads her over to the rushing stream of water, leaving Octavia to drift back over to her silent brother, stone-faced and menacing. Clarke even begins to feel the tiniest bit sorry for him.

She takes her jacket off, then her blood-ridden boots, then her sweaty socks that she’d been trying to make last the rest of the week. Then she sheds the slacks that she’s torn at the bottoms while climbing through the shrub and lets the cold October mist incapsulate her bare legs. Clarke leaves the olive vest top on, opting to let it get wet.

Not testing the water out on her bare foot is a mistake, choosing instead to dive straight in sends thousands of icy knives to cut at her skin in the space of a second. She’s surprised the water isn’t frozen.

It’s only when Clarke figures out how much she has to tread water to stay above the current that Raven speaks up, her feet swinging in the river while she sits on the bank.

“What happened?”

She’s only watching the ripples that her feet make, so Clarke takes to rubbing her hands through her hair for something to do.

“Walker pinned me to the floor,” It’s not much of an explanation but it’s all she can really give.

Raven nods her head, her lips pursed like she’s pissed.

“You didn’t say anything,”

“You would have tried to help me and then we all would have died,”

“I’d rather that than- “

“No, you wouldn’t Raven. I thought I was a gonner. Bellamy was right to tell you to leave,” Clarke says but doesn’t quite believe the words as she says them. In all logic, it was fair for him to tell them to leave her, but she can’t pretend it didn’t kill a small part of her.

“I should have stuck with my gut. I should have stayed and fought for you. You needed me and I, I left you,”

Now Clarke gets it. Raven isn’t mad at her, she’s mad at herself.

“If you’d gotten yourself killed to save me, I would have never forgiven you and you know that,”

“And how do you think I’d have felt, Clarke?”

Clarke feels the knots in the tips of her hair begin to loosen as she tugs roughly, refusing to meet Raven’s stern gaze.

“If you never came back? How would I be able to live with myself if I knew that I was the reason that you…”

“Well, I _did_ come back Raven. I’m here. Please don’t be mad at me for wanting you to live,” she begs.

“I’m not mad at you,”

Clarke nods her head and lets her hair fall back; frozen curls that have finally been separated. She runs her hands through her roots and feels the sharp edges of something plastic embedded at the back of her head somewhere. Now, the tiara comes free with a quick pull and she brings it down to trace its features.

The silver plastic has already turned a musky brown thanks to the days spent in her greasy bird’s nest of waves. A couple of the gems have fallen out and most of the glitter has worn off, probably still lost in her hair.

“How are you feeling?” Raven asks after a few minutes.

“Like shit,”

“Good,”

Clarke looks up to see her smirking that famous smirk of hers and she knows she’s forgiven.

“I know it’s probably a risk being so close to what just happened, but I don’t think any of us are up for moving for a while. Do you think we could just stay here for the rest of the day?”

“I guess so,” Clarke shrugs, secretly thankful for the respite and knowing that Raven is probably just asking for Clarke’s sake.

She decides she’s done with cleaning herself, admitting that she’s never going to be able to wash away the feeling of being a murderer. She climbs out and brings her dirty clothes with her, agreeing to wash them later when she has bit more energy. Clarke can’t afford discretion right now, walking around in her underwear is something she can live with.

They walk back over to the place where they’d left Bellamy and Octavia and the scent of a growing fire floods through her senses and makes her just that bit more weary, if that’s even possible.

Both of them are sat around the fire in silence, fighting for who can look the most sullen. She’ll deal with that later.

“Rae, I think I could use some sleep,” she says, swaying on her bare feet. “Do you think you could take care of things for a bit?”

Raven understands her pleading and must realize how unsteady Clarke is starting to become because she takes her elbow into her hand and leads Clarke over to the base of a tree, propping her down by her pack and laying her jacket over top.

She would be pissed about the mothering if she didn’t feel so damned tired.

“Get some rest, Clarke. I’ll wake you when we eat,”

“I’ll take watch in a few…” she mumbles but she’s already nodding off, into deep blank nothingness.

 

…

 

The sky is a bright coral orange when Clarke’s eyes start to flutter open and her mind recollects itself from the empty dreams. Sometimes she wishes she can fill them, even if it’s just nightmares because then at least it might take her out of the place she’s in for just a moment. She doesn’t feel any more awake than she had a few hours ago but at least now she feels that little bit more alive.

But it’s not Raven who is hovering over her with a small mug that is steaming over at the rim, it’s Bellamy. He’s staring at the ground to her right, his arm extended awkwardly holding the cup.

Clarke’s first instinct is to push herself up, so that she’s sitting against the trunk instead of sprawled out on the ground, which she follows. It gets her just that bit further away from him.

She takes the mug and drinks whatever is in it, despite the scorches that line the passage from her lips to her throat. It’s just boiled water but she does appreciate the extra warmth.

He looks like he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“You don’t have to be nice to me just because you were fine with letting me die,” she says, and he winces visibly.

“I wasn’t- I didn’t- you weren’t-“ he stammers then stops himself so that he can clear his head, literally shaking it out. “Clarke, just so you know, it wasn’t personal. I’m just trying to keep my sister alive,”

She stands up straight, grabbing the bow from the top of her pack and only becoming aware of how undressed she is once she’s wrapped the sheath of arrows around her shoulder. She’s too angry to care. What a pathetic excuse.

“Bellamy we’re living in a world where every decision we make can become detrimental. Everything is personal. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you might admit that I have only helped your sister.” He’s still knelt on the ground which leads her to the uncomfortable position of having his head level with her crotch, so she takes a step back, using that as an excuse to raise her voice.  “If you’d let me die, who’d have been there to save her five minutes later? Everything is personal. Fuck your truce. I don’t want a piece of shit deal that’s only valid when you allow it to be.”

The fact that he still refuses to look her in the eye only pisses her off more and all she wants to do is get out of there so Clarke grabs her bag and rummages through it for her spare pair of trousers, shoving them on before she retreats over to the still roaring fire to where Octavia and Raven are both sitting.

It’s not that she hates him. She doesn’t think she can have that kind of emotional capacity anymore but being within any sort of radius to him has started to make her blood boil.

“Tell your brother to-“ Clarke starts once she’s thrown herself down but Octavia cuts her off.

“I’ve tried, trust me.” She sends Clarke a guilty half smile and she nods her head in return.

Octavia looks back to where her brother is standing, and Clarke feels eyes burning into the back of her head, but she refuses to look behind her.

“I can’t believe you let me sleep the whole day away,” Clarke says, shooting daggers at Raven.

“You needed it,”

“I didn’t _need_ it,” she sulks.

“Sure, Clarke,”

They’re interrupted by Octavia’s stomach groaning loudly and the brunette responds by rolling on to her back.

“We need to eat,” Clarke decides, holding her hand out for Octavia to take and she lifts her bow to her other shoulder, reaching for the boots that are resting near the fire. Raven must have cleaned them off along with the rest of her clothes while she was out.

She sends her a look of thanks before she hauls the younger girl up.

“You wanted to learn to shoot, right?”

Octavia looks taken aback.

“No, honestly Clarke, we can do that some other time. You don’t need to- not today,”

“It’s fine, O,” Clarke says, shaking her head and looking up to the sky to determine how long they have. “We better be quick though, the sun’s almost down,”

Octavia’s face lights up and they brush past Bellamy, who is sat where Clarke had been sleeping, staring at his fingers and sulking. He looks like a teenage boy who’s been sent to his room and is contemplating packing his bags and leaving for New Mexico.

“Okay, teach me coach,” Octavia squeals.

Clarke takes them to a nearby tree that has captured the last ounces of sunlight then leads Octavia a few feet away from it, planting her so that she’s facing it.

She hands over her silvery bow, somewhat reluctantly, and takes an arrow from its holding point. It’s only then that she realizes how many she lost this morning, probably about a third of her stock and a part of her wants to tear through the stretch of forest to go back and pick every single one back up.

It’s too late now.

“Just so you know, we probably won’t find anything that’s edible. A lot of the rabbits we catch have been infected,” she says and passes over the arrow into Octavia’s spare hand.

The girl doesn’t look too disappointed.

“Oh. Well, that’s okay,”

“Come here I’ll show you what to do. Left, or right?”

“Right,”

“Okay so this is a left handed bow so it’s gonna be hard for you to shoot with it in your right hand,” Clarke says and Octavia lifts the bow, the arrow rest empty yet she’s pulling back the bow string probably as far as it will go like she’s about to fire.

“Wow, I feel badass,” Octavia says, smoldering off to the distance like a movie actor.

Clarke has to laugh but she hides it behind her hand.

“You’re a black belt, isn’t that badass enough?”

“Yeah, but I feel like some sort of hot Hawkeye,”

She snorts and then moves to corrects Octavia’s posture, framing her shoulders to the right some more.

“Hawkeye is hot,” Clarke mutters.

“You’re only saying that because you’re an archer,” the brunette replies, smirking and adjusting her line of sight parallel to the bowstring. “It’s in your DNA,”

Clarke takes her in and makes a mental list of the things she’s doing wrong and then moves to change each one.

“Okay place your left hand there and let your thumb go there,” Octavia does as she’s told, shifting her fingers lower down the cool metal. “Perfect. Only use two fingers to pull back the string so you’ve still got some precision,” Clarke slots the arrow into its rest and lets O’s hand catch the tips of it. “The arrow is aluminum so be careful. Yeah there in the rest and make sure the wings are facing outward otherwise you’ll be all over the place,”

Clarke steps back a foot or two, to assess the damage and then kicks lightly at both of Octavia’s feet.

“You aren’t shooting a gun. You can’t face your target head on, you’ve got to become streamlined so turn to the right. More. Great. Breathe in. Don’t shoot. Breathe out,”

She watches as Octavia lets the world slow down around her. The fog has started to clear itself out so they can see through to a few more trees and Clarke tries to line her gaze up to Octavia’s to see where she’s aiming.

“What’re you shooting for?”

“The tree,” she nods to the closest one.

“Aim higher or you’re going to shoot soil,”

Octavia’s eyes narrow and she focuses some more while she lifts the bow up a bit.

“Soil better watch its fucking back,”

Clarke lets herself laugh this time then steps back a bit further, giving her some space.

“You ready to shoot?”

“I’m ready.”

“Breathe in. now go.”

Octavia takes a few more seconds to gather her bearings and then she lets the string go. The arrow moves somewhat in slow motion through the air but its path isn’t halted by the trunk that the shooter was aiming for, instead it weaves its way through the masses of trees that line the forest floor until it’s gone, faded into the outskirts of the remaining mist.

“I think I may have lost your arrow,” Octavia says, sheepishly.

“It’s cool,” Clarke tries for ease, but she can’t ignore the nagging feeling that that is just another one gone. Another chink in her armor. Another layer taken until one day she’ll be standing alone and naked.

“Can I try?” A different, deep rumble appears from the camp that they’d set up. He sounds quiet and timid and Clarke’s rage recollects immediately.

“Excuse me?”

“I want to be a hot Hawkeye,” Bellamy is trying to sound light. Aiming for humor but Clarke doesn’t want it. She feels his joke has no dignity behind it when he won’t even look her in the eye.

She doesn’t wait around, every second spent around him feels like a knife to the chest. She holds her hand out and Octavia scrambles to give her the bow back. Clarke takes it and stalks out until she reaches a group of more closely packed trees. They’re all starving back there, the least she can do is find something for them to eat. And if hunting is what she needs to do to cool herself down then she’s happy to take the weak way out.

“Nice try Bell,” she hears Octavia mumble through the clearing.

“I’m trying to build bridges,” he sounds frustrated. Clarke can picture him pulling at the tips of his hair with both hands.

“That’s hard to do when they’ve already burnt down,” it’s a weak attempt at a joke.

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

Clarke hangs back, craning her ears just to see what stance his sister will take. She doesn’t know what to expect; she’s never seen a brother and sister act so much like one unit, but the look in Octavia’s eyes when Clarke walked away made even her feel scared.

“You made out like she was disposable. Like we shouldn’t care if she dies. You put a value on her life and shouted out to the only people that she can trust that it was worth less than ours. You can’t mope around and expect that to be the end of it. You can’t expect her to accept you. I for sure wouldn’t."

That is not what Clarke expected. She thought she expected kindness, like feeble sympathy. Or maybe she expected anger, because who wouldn’t be angry at what he did? But this sounded so… sad. So unlike Octavia.

It doesn’t take her long to find a squirrel, scampering around the tops of a tree like it’s escaping something, and Clarke shoots it down in one go. Dead in the eye. It’s safe, she thinks, no obvious signs of decay and no bloodshot eyes. At least they’ll get to eat tonight.

This was always the way she’d deal with things, even as a kid. In fact, that was how she got into archery as a kid. After the first time she’d fought with her mom for real, her father took her out into the woods with his training bow and taught her how to shoot makeshift targets that eventually turned into moving ones. And then it just became their gospel. Clarke and Mom fight. Clarke and Dad shoot. Clarke and Dad eat ice cream. Clarke and Mom make up.

She’d always be left feeling calm, like shooting would physically release any pent-up anger.

This is all she needed. Just a minute to feel like her old self, not just the shell that she is now. At least when she plays pretend like this, she can act like she isn’t alone. Like she doesn’t have to just be self-reliant. Of course, she has the others, but maybe it’s not the same.

At least now, Clarke can let go of all the tension that’s built up over the past few days. Or try to.

She wanders back to camp slowly, swinging the dead animal around in her right hand as though it is someone else’s hand and when she reaches the undying fire, Bellamy is gone, and Raven is in the river washing her hair.

Clarke drops the squirrel next to Octavia’s feet and the girl gasps when she sees it, her eyes heavenly under the firelight.

“I take it that wasn’t my kill?”

Clarke smiles and throws herself down next to her.

“Would you believe me if I told you it was?”

“Nope,”

Octavia gets up to throw another log onto the fire, and doesn’t speak until she sits back down, her hip nudging Clarke’s.

“I am sorry Clarke,”

“Why?”

“I can’t even count the number of times you’ve saved me in the past couple of days and I left you when you needed me. I don’t get how you can be okay with me after that,”

“I understand the importance of my life,” Clarke says quietly, hoping that the smoke might be able to shield their conversation from the outside world. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I knew you’d gotten yourself killed over me,”

“That’s not fair,”

“Nothing about this is fair,”

O’s face is all scrunched up like she’s trying to scratch a place on her back that she can’t reach, but then she begins to mutter sheepishly, filled with volition.

“I’m sorry about my brother. And I get that it hurt you, but you shouldn’t blame him for what we did. It was all of us making a conscious decision to go and I have to live with that. Raven has to live with that. Bellamy has to live with that too. I get that you don’t trust him, trust me, but he really…”

Octavia breathes coolly, a whistle in her breath while she thinks for a minute.

“I told you that he’s struggling to be happy, but I feel like it’s more than that. It feels like he won’t connect to anything anymore. He’s made saving me everything, but he doesn’t even talk to me,”

“We’re all dealing with this differently,”

Clarke tries, not sure why she’s defending the man who so carelessly forgot about her life a few hours ago.

“I know that but it’s just hard when the person you rely on the most won’t open up,”

Clarke raises her arm and wraps it around Octavia’s shoulders and the brunette responds by resting her head onto Clarke’s shoulder. She doesn’t realize how foolish she’s been until it hits her like a rock.

She is wasting time sulking about the fact that she’s actually found someone who understood what she wanted without her even having to ask. Bellamy knew that they needed to leave her. He knew that she’d rather die than risk any of their lives. And now he’s taking the villain label without complaint.

Maybe he’s not quite the bad guy that her own head has made him out to be. Maybe, just maybe, he’s feeling as lonely as Clarke is and just hasn’t found a way to deal with it.

“I think I should talk to your brother,” Clarke whispers into her hair.

“Maybe you should,” Octavia agrees. “I’ll cook the squirrel,”

Clarke gets up to leave, touching the top of her head as she stands but then O catches her hand and pulls her back to where she was sitting.

“Thank you, Clarke,”

She isn’t sure what she’s being thanked for, but Clarke nods her head and walks away, blaming the smoke for the fogginess in her mind.

She has no idea where she’s going to find Bellamy and the sun has basically gone now so she hasn’t even got light on her side.

But she hears some muffled swearing in the trees nearby and decides that might be the best place to start. It’s hard to distinguish where he is once she reaches a point where his mutters are clearly audible but as she nears, his silhouette becomes transparent and he is crouched, hunched over his foot and wincing.

“What the hell?” She asks, without a filter, but feels her tone soften at the pain in his eyes.

“I fell,” he says gruffly, clutching his foot.

There are scattered dandelions all around him that have been sheared from the ground almost like a crime scene. Clarke moves and stands over him, forcing him to look up at her.

“You sure did,”

“I could use a hand,” he sulks, and she drops down so that they’re sat opposite each other, like kids at elementary being made to get to know one another.

“What were you doing?” She asks, grabbing his foot from his own hands and carefully extending his legs to see where the injury is.

“Does it matter? I think I’ve broken something,” he reaches up to grab at his hair. “Fuck, I can’t afford to be off my feet,”

Clarke doesn’t take his boot off just in case he’s done something to his ankle and from looking at it, by the angle his foot is pointing to, it doesn’t quite look healthy.

“I’m not helping you until you tell me what you were doing,” she smirks, naively relishing in the power she has over him.

“Princess, now is not the time,”

He is gritting his teeth, only talking through them in sharp exhales.

She just stares and waits until he finally meets her eyes and once Clarke gets a read into the depths behind the honey whiskey color, he relents and sighs.

“I was trying to find you some flowers to apologize for being a dick,” he admits. “Now can you please not leave me here with a broken ankle?”

Clarke smiles to herself and once it’s out there, she finds that he can actually look her in the eye now.

No, he isn’t the bad guy.

“Only because you asked so nicely,”

She moves so that they are sat side by side and lets his hip rest on hers while she makes them both stand up awkwardly. He is only standing on one leg and when Clarke tells him to share his weight over both his feet, he lets out a loud, rough groan but doesn’t collapse back down.

“Well, it’s not broken,” She says, and he sighs like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “You do realize I was in medical school, right?”

Bellamy ducks his head sheepishly, for the hundredth time today and Clarke just resigns to rolling her eyes.

“Come on Romeo, let’s go assess the damage,”

“I was only trying to apologize,”

She swings his arm over her shoulders so that he can limp over her and Clarke can tell that, when they start moving again, he’s trying not to lean much of his weight on to her. She’s tempted to kick his feet out from under him just for acting so noble.

They take a few steps, more like shuffles, to the camp and it settles in how long this is actually going to take.

“Just for future reference, I’m not a big fan of weeds,” Clarke says to try and lighten the mood.

“It was all I could find,” he shrugs, then turns his face to hers and looks at her curiously. Clarke looks to the ground so that she can watch their feet and make sure they don’t trip over each other but it’s also a pretty good excuse to avoid his scrutinizing gaze. “What do you like then?”

“Oh, you know me. I never settle for anything less than twenty-four karats and only the purest diamonds,”

He looks unconvinced if anything, and Clarke has to laugh out loud at how unsure he is of whether she is joking or not.

“I’m kidding, Bellamy, lighten up,” she says, shrugging his arm so that it fits more comfortably around her shoulder. “One of these days you’re going to have to realize that I am not totally awful to be around,” It’s only half-serious when she says it, but knowing him, he takes it like an insult.

“I don’t think you’re awful,”

“Could have fooled me,”

Bellamy stops shuffling forward which makes Clarke have to stop too and when she turns her head to see what the problem is, he is staring straight at her, burning through her eyes. He looks young in the glint of the moonlight, tuffs of unruly curls scattered over his forehead.

“Look, Clarke, I’ve always found it difficult to let new people into my life. I’ve never been one to trust easily. So, while you think that I’ve been like this because I don’t like you then maybe that’s what it was on the first day but…”

He stops when he realizes that he is babbling but Clarke doesn’t let him take the easy way out. She wants him to say whatever he needs to until he’s gotten it all off his chest.

“I am sorry, Clarke, I really am. For what I said to you when we first met, for not thanking you for saving my sister not once, not twice, for not trusting you when there was no reason not to and for leaving you to die. Because that’s not what you do when you’re part of a team.

Octavia will say that it was all of us who ran away because that’s what she does. She’s spent her whole life covering my back. But I was the one who made the call. And I am sorry,”

Clarke feels like she’s been punched in the stomach, all the words knocked out of her. Instead, she takes his wrist and holds it in her hand, letting her fingers roll over each protruding bone and allowing her fingers to travel down to meet the back of his hand. She holds it high and watches her fingers as the shadows dance over their entwined hands, scared to look into his eyes. Bellamy doesn’t react, he just lets her do what she feels she needs to.

This feels intimate, more than like she’s letting him see her naked, and she decides that enough is enough when her hand glides over to his palm and she lets them rest there together, like two absurdly-disproportionate praying hands, when he responds so subtly that she almost misses it.

His lets his middle finger press forward, just enough to let her know he’s there. It shocks her so much that her eyes flick up to his out of astonishment, but he is already looking at her with that same curiosity that she only finds when he’s looking straight into her eyes.

Clarke clears her throat and then wordlessly moves to let him lean back on to her and they both shuffle in unison back to the fire, silent because their touch has said all the words there are to say.

“Oh, thank God,” Octavia says when they reach the camp and step into the firelight, neither of them look up they just let the shadows tell them that Clarke and Bellamy have come back. “We were starting to worry,”

“I don’t think there are any walkers nearby at the minute,” Clarke shrugs as she leads Bellamy over to the nearest tree and slouches him clumsily against it until he’s firmly planted in the ground with his leg raised over his rucksack.

“Oh no that’s not what I meant,” she turns around and takes in the sight suspiciously, eyes darting between the two of them. “Raven started panicking that we were gonna have to come and find you both boning.”

Bellamy sucks in a deep breath as Clarke starts to feel her way along his ankle and he hisses out a sharp “Octavia!”

“Don’t worry, I said that’ll never happen because Clarke has higher standards than that,”

Bellamy doesn’t reply but groans a little when Clarke hits a nerve somewhere.

“Octavia your brother is officially an idiot,”

“I know,” she agrees before thinking twice and back-stepping. “What’s the reason this time?”

“He’s fucked his ankle,”

Clarke hears his sister let out a quick laugh then Raven interrupts her. She sounds serious because she must have connected the dots pretty easily- if he can’t walk then none of them can.

“How?”

Bellamy looks into Clarke’s eyes and they share a look, him pleading her to stay quiet.

“He fell,” she answers, smirking and flashing her eyebrows at him. He ducks his head sheepishly but the smirk on his own face vanishes when Clarke tests out another part of his foot.

“The squirrel is done,” O chimes somewhere over her shoulder, squeaking only slightly as she peers over to her brother, concern written over her face.

“Since when are we eating squirrel?” Bellamy asks, head shooting up like he’s misheard.

“Since Clarke caught one,”

He looks to her again and he looks dubious, not knowing whether he should believe his sister, but Clarke just raises her eyebrows and leaves a questioning look in her own eyes, letting him work it out for himself.

“You did?”

She forgets that they haven’t eaten real meat in such a long time but the glint in his eye reaffirms how much they’ve missed it. He looks like a kid at Christmas.

“Yup. I think you’ve just dislocated it,” she starts, tapping her fingers along the skin that lines his calf.

“Just?” He sulks.

“Don’t be such a baby, Bell,” Octavia shouts across.

Clarke laughs lowly then places her hand on the heel of his boot, bracing herself on his leg. She’s always hated the feeling of relocations, they’re often worse than breaks to set and she remembers throwing up after she had to do her first one.

It was a kid, about fourteen, who had fallen from his skateboard trying to do some sort of three-sixty. Clarke gags at the image of his shoulder popping out at the most unnatural angle.

Stop. He’s gone now too.

She recollects herself then looks to Bellamy again, who is searching her face frantically. He doesn’t look scared or afraid, just uncertain.

“Okay, I’m going to pop it back in because it won’t start healing itself until I do,”

“You went to medical school, right?” he asks as a half-joke.

“You know, this might be a good time to start trusting me,” Clarke answers, smiling weakly.

“You want me to come and hold your hand, Bellamy?” They hear Raven joke from the fireplace and Clarke turns around to shoot her a grin.

“Shut up and eat your squirrel, Reyes,”

“Okay, I’ll count to three and then it’ll be in,”

Bellamy braces himself by placing each of his hands on either side of him and then nods shakily.

She gets ready to push.

“One, Tw-“

Clarke jerks the foot roughly, feeling as the limb forces its way back into the socket with a loud pop and Bellamy follows by grunting low and deep, the sound making her blush involuntarily. She feels only partially guilty because she can already see the relief seep into his features, but he hides it well and flashes her a look of contempt.

“Fuck! Princess, you said you’d count to three!”

“I said it’d be in by three. If you’d been expecting it, it would have only hurt you more,” he nods reluctantly. “See, it didn’t hurt that much, did it?”

“Easy for you to say,”

Clarke moves to take his boot off, admitting that if she’s going to bandage the foot up, she needs full access. She undoes the laces carefully then reaches into his bag to find a bandage, locating one somewhere at the bottom, then she takes his sock off and wraps the soft cotton several times around the bruised area.

Once she’s happy with her handiwork, Clarke takes Bellamy’s foot and raises it to rest on the bag for elevation. She rolls back on to her feet so that she’s crouching low and assesses the ankle.

“We might need to find you some sort of crutch, but you’ll be walking by tomorrow, I’m pretty sure,”

Bellamy goes to say something, looking pretty pained and tired yet still relieved, but Raven calls her over and she turns to run over, leaving him with his foot propped awkwardly.

“Yeah?” She asks, slumping next to Octavia so that she can catch a break bouncing between the three of them.

“How do you feel about staying here tomorrow?” Raven asks, prodding the fire with a stick.

“Why’s that?” Clarke wonders aloud, unsure.

“Well, it’s not raining, we’ve got running water, there’s edible food which means the infection is scarce around here. Plus, we don’t want to risk getting caught out with a handicap,” she says and nods her head over at Bellamy who is sat fiddling with the same knife in his hands.

“And we _have_ got a fire,” Octavia adds, raising her hand like a child in class.

“And we’ve done so much highway walking that we’ve probably covered enough ground to earn a break,”

Clarke watches them squirm fondly, finding amusement in their attempt to convince her. They must not realize that she’s walking dead on her toes, practically stumbling over her own feet. The sleep from earlier helped but her mind is still kind of imploding and a whole day of rest might be what she needs to kickstart whatever has short circuited. It feels like forever ago since they shared that bottle of whiskey over a sheltered, pathetic fire.

“I’m not the one you’re going to have to convince,” she says, exasperated and gesturing over to the man sat limp against a tree a few feet away before she moves to gather her discarded bag to search through it for some water.

“Well, it’s not like I’m gonna be of any use trying to make it on my own,” he says, gruffly.

“That settles it,” Octavia grins, raising her mug of boiled water over the fire to clink it to Raven’s.

 

…

 

“There you go,” Raven says a few hours later after they’ve eaten and are all lying down around the fire, trying to talk across the flames. “I found you a stick,”

She throws a thin tube of wood down by Bellamy’s foot that looks about the length of his leg and he grunts in thanks.

“I can’t believe we just ate a real meal,” Octavia sighs, content as she rolls over to look at the sky.

“I know,” Clarke says, smiling as she scoots to join her.

“Is it weird that I’m feeling really good right now?”

“It’s not a crime, O,” Raven laughs, landing on the other side of the brunette.

Clarke hears some shuffling about, and some groaning before something heavy leans on her left. She turns her head to see Bellamy gazing up at the stars lying down next to her and when she raises her eyebrows in questioning, he turns slowly and shrugs.

“It was cold,” he says simply and Clarke smiles to herself. He tries to pretend he’s not smiling back but they both know the glint in his eyes isn’t from the fire.

“Okay, game time. Each of us has to take in turns asking questions. The first person to refuse to answer one has to take first watch and we go until someone either lies or doesn’t answer,” Raven starts, the smirk already in her voice.

“That sounds like trouble,”

“I’m game,” Bellamy shrugs.

Clarke starts to question whether he might have taken something to ease the pain. Or maybe this is him. The real him behind all that bravado.

“Clarke?” Octavia asks, twisting her head awkwardly.

“Sure,”

“Okay, I’ll go first,”

She turns her neck to the other side and looks to Raven. Clarke can picture her eyes narrowing as the determination takes over her face.

“Why are you going to Vancouver, Raven? We know why Clarke is, but why are you?”

Raven stays looking up and Clarke cranes her neck to see her expression. She has her lips pursed in contemplation and her ponytail is scattered across the dewy grass like a fan.

“Clarke and Wells have always been a set pair. You don’t really get one without the other so when I met Clarke, I met Wells too and then we sort of became a trio. They kind of adopted me into their little team even though I didn’t come from some rich background and I was kind of a nobody. You don’t forget things like that. They became my family when I barely had any,”

“So, you want to be with Wells too?” Bellamy chimes from Clarke’s other side.

“Sure, I just want to be with my people,”

“You should have seen Wells back in high school. He had the biggest crush on Raven. He even let her cheat off him in German and he never let anyone do that,”

Octavia smiles. Bellamy stays quiet and Clarke doesn’t look at him, but she can feel the concentration radiating off of him in buckets.

“My turn,” Raven says, smugly. “Bellamy, why were you going into the army? Last time I saw you, you were becoming a writer, right?”

He clears his throat before answering, sighing under his breath like he already regrets agreeing to playing.

“It wasn’t the right time for college,”

There’s a pause as they wait for him to continue but he seems content with his answer.

“Not fair, I shared loads,”

He sighs again, louder, then rethinks.

“How honest do I have to be?”

“Just answer the question, Bell,” Octavia scolds, fondly exasperated.

“We couldn’t afford it, okay? I thought I could spend a few years in the army to make some money. No twenty-something writer is ever any good anyway. They’re always broke and depressed.”

“Didn’t Fitzgerald write The Great Gatsby in his twenties?” Clarke thinks aloud.

“He was an alcoholic, he had like two heart attacks and died when he was forty,”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good writer,”

“That’s because he had life experience. He knew how to paint the picture of the jazz age because he was in the heart of it. What do I know about any of the shit I write?”

“What shit do you write?” Clarke asks.

“Isn’t it supposed to be my turn?”

Clarke laughs to herself, rolling her eyes at his defensiveness but she lets Bellamy change the subject.

“How do you shoot so straight, Griffin?”

Clarkes stops smiling and brings her knees up so that she’s not lying flat anymore. She rests her palms on her thighs to brace herself then turns her face to look up to the sky. The mist isn’t covering them anymore, but it’s still hanging low in the sky so that it blanks out the stars and leaves just darkness. Like an empty canvas waiting for a masterpiece to be scattered across it.

She can answer whatever they throw at her, right? She doesn’t have to tell him _everything;_ just be honest.

“My dad taught me when I was eight and we had this huge woods next to our home so I practically lived in them when I was sad, or angry, or tired, or whatever,” she says, imagining that she’s painting the stars across the sky with every word. “I guess you get pretty good at something when it becomes as natural as breathing,”

No-one answers or finishes what she’s saying, which is good because it means she doesn’t have to rush to figure it all out.

“And, it was pretty nice to have something that I didn’t have to work for. Getting into Stanford was really hard work and I liked having something that I didn’t have to actually think about,”

“I get that,” Octavia hums to herself.

“My turn,” Clarke says, wondering what she wants to know about them. “How did you guys get the guns?”

She’s still looking up and even she doesn’t know who she’s directing the question to, but Octavia takes the question for herself.

“We had one in our mom’s safe. And then we just sort of picked them up along the way…” she trails off, leaving the obvious truth unsaid.

It’s ugly, so they don’t say the real answer, but Clarke hears it anyway. They must’ve taken them from any of the corpses that they’d passed, the ones that had been too fucked up to change. Or the ones that had been halfway through the process. Ugly. But it’s survival.

No, what Clarke wants to know more about is why their mom had a gun in the first place.

“Clarke?”

“Yes, Raven?” she smirks.

“Stones or the Beatles?”

“Umm,” Clarke says, pretending to think about it. “Stones,”

“Please,” Bellamy somewhat gasps.

Clarke turns to him again, and he’s wearing a look of outrage.

“What?”

“The Beatles were legendary. Comparing them to the Stones is like comparing Elvis to… I don’t know, Justin Bieber,”

“That’s a riot,” Clarke says, sitting up incredulously. “How can you even say that with conviction?”

She has to lean around a bit so that she can still look at him but lying down right now doesn’t really seem possible. He stares up at her and looks like he’s trying not to laugh, which only angers her more. Well, she’s not angry. Just… confused.

“Okay, Princess, cool it. I’m just saying, there’s a difference,” he smirks.

“Sure there is, but the Stones were iconic,” she says, gesturing her hands around uncontrollably.

He’s really smiling. Not one of the ones that have guilt hidden behind them but he’s smiling almost obnoxiously now. Clarke decides she likes it. Relatively speaking.

“And you’re saying that the band responsible for the last British invasion isn’t?”

She doesn’t really know what to say because he’s still smiling widely with his teeth flashing in light she can’t trace and sure, he might have a point. So, she lies back down and realizes how close their heads are for the first time. Almost touching and the tips of her hair have fallen over his shoulder, his black nylon jacket cradling the soft curls.

“You two done with your spat?” Raven asks over their wall of people.

“Ask Clarke,” Bellamy mutters, nudging against her thigh with the back of his hand.

Clarke turns on her side, smiling smugly, then looks to Octavia to see her glancing over Clarke’s head to grin fondly at her brother. There’s something else in her gaze but Clarke tries to ignore it because it’s clearly not her business.

“Okay, Raven, first time?” Bellamy asks.

“Really?”

Raven sounds unimpressed, rightly so, and Clarke rolls her eyes, wondering what she found so charming in his smile before.

“I mean, if you don’t want to answer…”

“Ugh fine. Ross Gilbert, tenth grade,”

“Ross Gilbert!?” Clarke says, unable to keep herself from cringing.

“Yup, on his father’s couch,”

“Classy,” Octavia laughs.

“He was cute,” Raven shrugs back while Clarke has a mini stroke trying to figure out what her best friend is even saying.

“He was gross!”

“You’re only saying that because he followed you all the way to your house to ask you to prom,”

“No, sure, because that was a totally appropriate thing to do,” Clarke drawls, feeling her eyebrows scrunch up. “I can’t believe you slept with Ross Gilbert,”

“Yeah, well, you kissed Robbie Teller in high school,”

“Who was Robbie Teller?” O questions, shifting to lean on her side with a gleeful smile on her face.

“Some guy who egged Wells’ house as a dare,”

“That was different,” Clarke says quietly, wriggling to get comfortable and falling helplessly on her back.

“You gonna quit fidgeting?” Bellamy mutters beside her and he crosses his arms grimly.

Clarke just nudges his ribs with her elbow but takes note of the fact that he doesn’t respond.

“How was it different?” Octavia asks.

“It was a game of seven minutes in heaven,”

“More like half an hour,” Raven whispers blatantly.

“He had cute hair,” Clarke just shrugs, smiling to herself as she remembers that night and how far away it feels now. She can’t even remember the taste of his lips anymore. “What about you, O?”

She feels Bellamy start to splutter a bit and then cringes inwardly as she realizes the question she just asked.

Octavia doesn’t seem to notice though; she looks at Clarke with a straight face and lists off the details like she’s reading a driver’s manual.

“Atom Charles, eleventh grade,” she says, ignoring Bellamy’s gagging motions. “I had to sneak him in while Mom and Bell were out working, but I got pretty lucky because they were both working night shifts,”

“Octavia!”

“Shh, Bell. I’m having girl chat,”

He sighs gruffly then raises both his hands to his head to cover his ears like an infant. Clarke slaps his arms away before they can get to his head, to stop him from making himself look like an idiot.

“Change the subject, please, anyone!” he groans, melodramatically.

“Fine,” Raven laughs, rolling on to her stomach. “Bellamy, go-to dance move?” she smirks.

Clarke can practically picture the scowl on his face.

“You know I don’t dance,”

“Everyone dances,” Clarke says, shaking her head knowingly. “It just depends on who they’re willing to dance with,”

“Well, I don’t dance with anyone,”

“It’s true, he didn’t even dance at his senior prom. Roma was so pissed at him, it was hilarious,”

“Answer the question, Bellamy,” Clarke teases, raising herself onto her elbows so that she hovers over him.

He looks into her eyes, and she raises her eyebrows to challenge him, but he just grins and shakes his head.

“Not happening, Princess,”

“And we have our loser, ladies and gentlemen,” Octavia sighs, standing up and brushing off her legs casually like she knew who was going to lose all along.

“That’s cool, I’m not tired anyway,” Bellamy shrugs, sitting forward to place another log on the fire, kicking it roughly with his boot.

“You sure you’re gonna be alright with a whole leg out of action?” Raven asks as she gets up to set up some sort of sleeping station against one of the trees along the circumference of their camp.

“I’m not braindead, Raven,” he says, scooting closer to the fire. “I’m capable of keeping watch for a few hours,”

“If you’re sure, Bell…” Octavia trails off.

 

…

 

Clarke emerges from that same coma-like state halfway through the night when a canteen lands roughly on her stomach and causes her to sit up, winded and gasping. Raven is hovering over her wearing an apologetic smile.

“Sorry, that was the only way to wake you without waking everyone else up,” she whispers gently.

Clarke nods her head, then pulls herself to her feet and shakes herself out to stop the drowsiness.

“How long have I been out?”

“Few hours. The sun will be out pretty soon,”

“That’s cool, I’ll take last watch,”

Clarke lets Raven hover for a moment more, then steps over to the simpering fire to wait… and wait.

She takes her bow off of her shoulder and clasps it in her fist as her eyes begin to dart casually around the camp. It’s nights like these that feel the realest. Pretending is the only word to describe what she’s doing and what she has been doing ever since it happened. Pretend to be happy, pretend to be angry, pretend to be scared, pretend to be strong, pretend to be weak, pretend to be herself. It’s something of a never-ending cycle because, really, there is only one way to be and that’s emotionless.

And, now, that’s different from enjoying the passing time because she can do that. But emotions are the suicide pills, the last-ditch efforts to stay alive and she can’t risk using them up.

Yesterday she had to be a soldier. A fighter. A pawn in the chess game but time ticks and it keeps on ticking and soon it’ll be up. Checkmate.

She runs only the tips of her fingers along the rigid bowstring and remembers the dreary violin lessons her mother used to make her go to every single week. It’s strange how she’d never gotten the hang of it considering how talented she is with a bow.

Pretend Clarke, pretend that’s all a dream. This is reality now and you know that.

Heavy breathing radiates from all around her but there are only three pitches and they all sync up harmonically.

It feels good to be around more people. Alone seems more distant now. She still can’t push away that feeling of loneliness but at least she’s one more step away from isolation.

Raven was right, the sun will rise in an hour or two, but she’ll let the others sleep for as long as she can. If they’re taking a day’s break, then she wants them to get the rest that they need.

Poor Bellamy, she thinks in a moment of weakness. She just wants to get a read into his mind, to know what he’s thinking. She can’t even picture what he must have been like before all of this. The picture of him sat at a typewriter wearing those round writer glasses seems laughable but so does the image of him wearing army greens, standing to attention.

Anything but the man in black hiking trousers and a thin, nylon jacket who looks so consistently melancholy yet cold all the same, seems implausible. What must the old her look like in their heads?

Clarke has lost count of the days now. What’s the use in counting?

Wells, if he’s even out there, will wait for her no matter how long she takes. She hopes she can still remember what he looks like. No, she can. Definitely.

The flow of the river acts as the percussion for the others’ breathing and it’s nice to hear something so fluid, so rhetoric.

She doesn’t have to organize her thoughts during nights like these. She can try all she wants but she doesn’t have to, and it feels good to have that comfort. There’s just so much to think about yet so little.

Okay, start with the strengths: they’ve got plenty of water for now, they’re not running low on food, everyone has begun to mold together finally, they’ve covered consistent amounts of ground and they’re all trained in some sort of combat.

And the weak links: more people means more exposure, she’s running desperately low on ammo, Bellamy has fucked his ankle up, the weather is only going to get worse with winter approaching.

She can work with that. It’s manageable. Not ideal but what even is ideal anymore?

There’s a shift to her right and Clarke snaps out of her inner ramble, raising her loaded bow to the source of the sound but it’s only Bellamy stirring softly in his sleep. So, he’s actually sleeping then. Maybe if he knew that she was the one keeping watch, he’d be ‘sleeping’ with one eye open. Or maybe he’s past that now.

Clarke knows she didn’t hesitate to let herself fall unconscious under his protection last time but that was without thought. She doesn’t even comprehend it until she realizes how at peace he looks now.

Maybe he could have been a writer. When he’s rid of all that tension, Bellamy looks almost soft.

She takes in each feature of his face slowly, allowing herself to absorb every imperfection. It’s strange how similar he looks like Octavia yet so different. Each expression, each smile rings so true to the other but in the flickering flames Clarke notices the freckles that dust his cheeks like baby pinpricks tinted as though kissed by the sun. His nose is bent at an angle midway up, definitely broken before. He has weirdly long eyelashes. And the military cut of his hair has remained despite how wild and tame the ebony curls make it look.

“You planning on doing that for long?” His lips move narrowly in a whisper and Clarke is close enough to hear him. He doesn’t open his eyes, but his mouth forms a smile faintly and Clarke drops her head to the fire like a flash.

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” She says to the piled logs.

“And you’re supposed to be keeping watch, not scrutinizing me like I’m going to up and leave at any second,”

Bellamy leans his head back against the tree trunk and keeps his voice low so as not to wake the others.

“I wasn’t scrutinizing you,” Clarke shrugs, knowing he would take whatever she does as an insult.

“Sure, Princess,”

He puts his weight on both his hands then scoots himself forward to join her and sit on a thicker log near where she has parked herself, atop her pack.

“How’s your foot?” She asks, poking it with her bow.

“Broken,” he sulks, feigning a dramatic flinch in response to which she grins.

The sun is visible beyond the tree line and daylight has started to breach their camp, but it is still probably only about six a.m.

“Sorry about all your arrows,”

“Don’t worry about it,” Clarke says to avoid thinking about how many she lost.

“I’m not worried, but it means something,”

“And how would you know that?” She asks, not with spite.

“You cling to that thing like it’s your lifeline,”

“It _is_ my lifeline,”

“You know what I mean,” he shrugs and prods the fire with his other foot as though he’s seeing how many times, he can do it before his boot catches. “Like it’s another limb.”

Clarke’s finger taps lightly against the shiny metal of the bow and she lets it follow the rhythm of her pulse, unable to recognize how this shell of a weapon is now more vital than even her own heart. Her heart can only save _her_. She can save anyone with this.

“That’s a load of shit,” Bellamy snorts and Clarke freezes up at the realization that she must have said her last thought out loud.

She decides to defend herself though, because there’s no going back now.

“How so?”

He shrugs gruffly then looks to her exasperated. Holding his hands up like he’s trying to carry boxes that tower over his head, grasping at thin air.

“Gotcha,” she smirks, and Bellamy drops his head, grinning sheepishly.

“Why don’t you let yourself smile?” Clarke asks after a few minutes listening to the fire spark and crack. She tries to sound easy like she doesn’t care and reckons she gets away with it when he sighs and runs his hands through his hair, tugging at the tips a bit.

“I do,” he feigns but she just glares at him until he relents. “Just doesn’t feel right, you know?”

“No,” she laughs.

He sighs again to rethink then continues.

“It doesn’t feel right to let yourself be happy when so many people don’t have that chance anymore. I don’t want happiness because maybe we don’t deserve it. And every time I get close to happy it just reminds me that someday I won’t even feel anything anymore,”

“You’re so sure that you’re not going to make it out of this?” Clarke whispers.

“I spent weeks thinking out our future and I guess I don’t really care,”

Clarke wonders why he’s being so honest but she’s tentative because she doesn’t want to crack the ice that they’re tiptoeing on.

“You’re okay with dying?”

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “But I know that if I need to die for my family to survive then _that_ is what I need to be okay with,”

It hits her, suddenly, how naïve she’s been. How can she have seen this man as immature before? She’s become so absorbed in her own trust issues that she hasn’t seen what a giving person he is. Her willingness to die for her friends feels almost childish now, in comparison to the bluntness of his own.

“Way to keep it light, Bell,” Octavia mumbles from her own tree as she rubs her eyes harshly.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” he sulks when he turns around to see his sister. Clarke shoves him lightly when she notices that he’d countered the same accusation only minutes earlier.

“Well you’re supposed to stop making people cry,”

“Clarke isn’t crying,”

“ _I_ will be if you don’t shut up,”

She turns to stalk away over to the river, looking insultingly good having just woken up. When Clarke turns back to continue talking to Bellamy, she notices him watching his sister carefully as she makes her way over to the water, unknowingly lifting the knife he keeps in his hands at all times.

“Hungry?” she asks, nudging his shoulder to ease him a bit.

He doesn’t take his eyes away, but he nods his head and Clarke stands to reach into her bag. She takes out one of the few packs of dried fruit she has left and chucks it into his lap then starts to count out how much food she actually has. With double the mouths to feed, their food sources are dwindling at twice the rate so they’re going to have to find something pretty soon if they want to keep going.

Raven is still asleep over where Clarke had been a few hours ago but she drops down some dry crackers next to her for when she wakes up.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'He held her hand like it was a mystery,'  
> \- Jack and Jill, Katie Herzig


	4. Sing me to sleep, and then leave me alone

The sun is all the way above them when Raven is finally up and awake, already complaining about the fact that they let her sleep in. It isn’t until they’ve all finished the tiny rabbit Clarke caught earlier that she stops sulking.

Octavia is sitting in her vest and some oversized boxer shorts with her hair in a bun while it dries, she too looks much more content having just washed and eaten something filling.

Clarke wonders if, when Bellamy can walk on his own again, he might be able to show them how to find edible mushrooms or some other sort of vegetable, because it’s been so long since she’s had anything fresh that she’s started to forget what it would taste like.

“You want a hand?” Raven asks Bellamy when Clarke is circling their camp looking for some more firewood to keep it going. He’s been staring over at the river for almost an hour, to the point that he’s started to lose track of where he actually is.

“I can take care of myself Raven. I’m not disabled,”

“Suit yourself,” she shrugs, looking back to Clarke and smirking.

He tries to stand up and looks like he’s actually going to be able to step forward until he shifts all of his weight on to his right ankle and almost crumples back down to the floor.

“Shout me when you’re done with your nobility complex,” Raven says sighing and stalking past him hurriedly on her way over to the river. Once she’s passed Bellamy, she turns and nods her head to Clarke as if to say, ‘you coming?’

Bellamy sits back down and takes to poking the fire roughly with the end of the stick that Raven found last night, watching the charred tip flake into soot. Clarke grins and pats his shoulder on her way around the fire, already reaching for the edges of her vest top.

They must be nearing the middle of October and this will probably be the last few swims they can really have before winter sets in, especially since they’re travelling north. Clarke dreads to think what they’re going to do in December to find shelter.

She tugs her shirt off and the heavy dry slacks, leaving them with her boots in a pile on the side of the river, before she dives into the current and follows Raven into the middle of the water.

They’ve got to stay alert just in case there are any stray Walkers on the other side of the riverbank because it’s harder to hear them over the rushing water, and they’d be defenseless. Sometimes it’s just hard to remember that.

Clarke feels a hand on her knee before she is yanked and flipped so her head is underneath the surface. The water feels almost freezing cold and the lungful of air she gasps before going under feels like it solidifies almost instantly. She opens her eyes, to see what pulled her under but Raven’s grinning face appears next to her, distorted by the ripples.

She pushes against the bottom of the mud bed, feeling it dissipate between her toes and breathes in deeply once she returns to the surface.

“What the fuck!?” Clarke hears from behind her and spins, spanning her hands out, to see Octavia getting ready to jump back in and craning her head like she’s searching for something. Bellamy is hobbling over awkwardly, rushing and skipping over his own feet.

Raven brings herself back up casually, then takes in the panic across both siblings’ faces before she takes on one of her own.

“I was only messing about,”

“Yeah, well don’t,” Octavia scowls. “You almost gave me a heart attack, I thought Clarke had been bitten or something,”

“Chill, O, I’m good,” Clarke says, moving to tread water in the space between the two girls as though that might cut the tension. “Two arms, ten toes and a full head of hair,”

“She’s right Clarke, you must know what that looked like?” Bellamy chirps, grunting a bit at standing on his own.

“Since when did the Blakes get so uptight?” Raven laughs, nudging Clarke’s shoulder awkwardly with a tense smile.

“It’s done now, can’t we just forget it?” Clarke tries for diplomacy and hopes it might be enough for the siblings to subside.

It is, but O walks off into the trees, probably to find some more firewood, in a rage.

Clarke turns back around, ignoring the daggers Bellamy is shooting to the ground and looks pointedly to Raven.

“What?” Raven asks innocently but Clarke doesn’t take the bait, just waits for the fake smile to disappear. “Jeez Clarke, not you too.”

“Time and place,” Clarke shrugs, letting her hair fall back to fan around her face as she treads water.

“I was only trying to have some fun. May I remind you that you almost died yesterday?”

“Oh yeah I’d completely forgotten about that,” Clarke drawls.

“You know what I mean,”

“Yes, just be careful.”

“I’m not going to apologize for that,” Raven snaps, not at Clarke just generally and Clarke begins to feel a bit sorry for how seriously they’re all taking her teasing. “We both agreed long ago that we wouldn’t lose who we are, Clarke. This is me trying not to become some shell,”

“She’s got a point,” Bellamy chirps from the edge of the riverbank.

He’s sat himself down now with his slacks rolled up so he can swish his feet against the moving current, leaning back leisurely on his hands.

 When Clarke looks to him, he looks a bit shy and nods his head. “Nobility complex is gone,”

Clarke snorts a quick ‘please’ then paddles over to wear he is, only just reaching him when she realizes she doesn’t know quite what to do to help.

“You’re okay,” he laughs, probably at how flustered she looks and makes a gesture of kicking some water up into her face to make the point that he’s okay without her smothering.

Raven has already swum away to some other part of the river, probably aiming to do a couple of laps up and down because they all know she can’t sit still for too long.

“Her point...?” Clarke trails off, hoping for him to finish off what he’s thinking even if she can already assume what Raven was trying to say.

“I had the same kind of mentality at the beginning of all this,” he starts casually, still sliding his feet through the waves. Clarke would get out and sit beside him so she could hear him more if it weren’t for the sudden realization of how exposed she is in just her underwear, combined with the icy breeze that comes with the current. She opts to keep herself afloat, submerged up to her shoulders for some absent-minded decency.

“You did?”

“I just didn’t want to lose my humanity, if that makes sense?”

It sounds ridiculous, because that is what this whole survival thing is about. But on another level, Clarke can understand what he means. He didn’t want to lose the core of what he is.

“What changed?” She wonders aloud.

“Nothing really. I guess other things just became more important. Food became scarcer, nights became colder, we started to get more and more weak. Things like that feel pretty irrelevant after a while,”

“You two are a lot of things but you sure aren’t weak,” Clarke laughs.

“You know what I mean,” He says back, half-smiling.

They are silent for a moment or two, with Clarke still treading water carefully and him still splashing rhythmically but it feels nice, easy. Like they don’t need to rush.

“Talk to me, Clarke,” he says lowly when she moves to wring out her bra, unabashed.

It startles her but she regains her composure and asks what he wants to hear.

“Anything. It’s just nice to listen to your voice,” he nods.

It’s not a compliment, nor a declaration but sort of an admission of guilt. Clarke feels like he expects her to turn around and slap him for saying something so seemingly outrageous.

 _He was never good at friends;_ she thinks back to their earlier conversation. But how can someone so confident and sure seem so shy now?

“You want to hear how I got my first job?” Clarke smiles to herself, backstroking her way back over to him and letting the cold prick the skin of her chest and stomach as it rises above the surface.

“Shoot,”

“There was this diner a couple of streets away from where we lived that me and Wells used to sneak over to every time we were hungover. One morning me and my mother got into this huge argument about where I was going to go to school. She wanted to use the fact that my parents were going to pay for me to go in order to convince me to go to Yale.

 She wanted me to go to the closest possible Ivy, but I honestly didn’t care where I wanted to go, the only condition for me was to be as far away from home as possible.

I mean, I loved New Orleans, but my family were starting to become unbearable, with all the arguing. I just needed to breathe; you know?”

He nods and waits for her to continue.

“So, I told her that if she was going to carry on using money as some sort of weapon, then I may as well pay for my own college. I stormed out of the house and marched my way over to the diner and pleaded with them until they gave me a job,

I told them that the number of Beignets I’d bought from them had practically kept their business afloat over the years and then they relented, threw me a dirty apron and begun to pay me way below the minimum wage.

But it made me happy, actually working for something, earning my own education and the idea that I could be totally independent was so exciting,”

Bellamy smirks at her, noticing how her eyes have started to glow and he laughs under his breath.

“So, you were a little grease monkey?”

“I was the waitress who broke records for the tips I got from old ladies,” she corrects.

“Grease monkey,” he chimes low and teasingly with a smile on his face. “I can’t believe your mom was pissed at you for choosing to go to Stanford,”

“Nah, she was pissed at me because I wouldn’t do exactly as she told me. I was tempted so many times to tell her that I wouldn’t be going to med school at all. She would have had a heart attack,” Clarke smiles, but the pain hits her as soon as the words leave her mouth. It’s hard to remember, after all those memories, that she’s just gone now.

Bellamy doesn’t need to be told that her mother is dead- he catches on to the past tense easily and Clarke doesn’t feel tempted to tell him how she died. They can save that for another depressing trip down memory lane. Let this one be happy, even if it is a bit sober.

 

…

 

Raven catches a salmon in the evening, and they sit, in comfortable silence watching as the sun drifts below the skyline. Clarke had decided to spend a few hours with Octavia, talking endlessly as they went about completing the small jobs that they can’t quite get to when they’re on the move, like sewing the holes in their socks with frayed cotton thread and the smallest knife they have.

It’s a nice distraction to learn the intricacies of another person’s life and Clarke takes it willingly, listening as Octavia spills whatever thoughts drift into her head. They don’t get too personal, Clarke wonders if they ever will.

Once she’s finished, she heads to get some rest and relishes in having some alone time just for a couple hours. It doesn’t take long for her to pass out, cradling her bow in one hand and the other arm thrown across her pack.

The next thing she knows, she’s awake and gasping, panicking towards a green tinted sky and surrounded by the endless groans of those not quite dead. Her neck flips to find the source of the sound but can’t trace it. There are no bodies anywhere, not even her companions who she could have sworn she had seen drift off easily just hours ago.

Her blood runs cold, thumping through her veins to drown out the approaching moans. Clarke stands and yanks her bag over her shoulders, reaching to load her weapon before she takes off.

The place she’s in looks like where they’d made camp- a small circle of flat ground and short grass- but it’s lacking in any sign that someone has been here. There are no traces of burnt logs from their campfire, no packs lying around haphazardly. This is trouble.

She stumbles away from the site, refusing to accept the fact that she’s alone. The groans follow her but don’t intensify and she breaks into a run, sprinting in any direction she can think of, following the random moonbeams that taint the forest floor.

Then there is a cry, from no more than a few feet away. A high-pitched, blood curdling scream and before Clarke can so much as turn to the noise she turns and retches last night’s fish over her freshly cleaned boots. She vomits with so much force that she’s thrown forward, close enough that she can see streaks of red through the half-digested salmon.

She tries to ignore the fact that she’s started throwing up blood. She’s lasted this long. She will not catch the infection now. She can’t.

There’s that scream again. But it’s different this time, resonating much lower and it’s clearly a man.

It’s coming from the opposite direction and she runs to it, unthinking. She ends up having to crawl through a shrub thick with thorns and bristles and her face becomes lined with scratches, old cuts reopening, the blood starting to drip into her eyes. When a particularly nasty gash appears on her nose, she looks to it and sees stale brown blood start to leak from it. _No._

She tears through the shrub and sees him. His darkened skin flooded with protruding purple veins and his eyes turned nearly red with bloodshot.

He’s in pain, that’s clear from the noises he’s making but Wells is smiling. Menacingly in a way that she has never seen. Brown is leaking from his mouth, cascading down his lips in clots as he howls and cackles. Ecstatic with the pain.

“You found me,” He says, low and bitter.

Clarke can’t speak. She can’t feel her own tongue so attempting to form words is a pointless endeavor.

“This is on you, Clarke,” Wells laughs as he falls onto his back, squirming and scuffling across the ground like he’s having a seizure. The cataracts in his eyes rolling back just to reveal more stark white. “You were too late.”

His body stops, and the moans close in. They’re all around her now. She’s got seconds. But Clarke doesn’t care, because he’s gone and that’s it. That’s all she had to live for.

Wells’ body stands and he stumbles over to her, his knee popping out at an unnatural angle. His face, or what was his face, has lost all humor now but he’s angry and spitting brown at her head with venom.

He stops just before her and bares his teeth, or what is left of them. And all she knows after that is the sound of her own flesh tearing from her body as her bones are cracked and her blood vessels sucked dry by her last remaining shred of the days before.

“Clarke!”

Her eyes flash open, and she sees stars thanks to how tightly she’d been squeezing them shut. She’s met with chocolate brown eyes that are blown wide and terrified just inches from her own.

Bellamy is panting and he’s got her arms pinned to the trunk of the tree she had fallen asleep against.

She starts to move the instant she realizes what is happening and squirms to shake him off, crying out when he takes more than a moment to let her arms go. She shoves against his chest and he topples back, still unsteady having only one functioning leg. He falls back onto his elbows, propping himself up but he breathes a sigh of relief.

Clarke stands to her feet and feels every part of her shiver, the tips of her fingers visibly shaking but her skin is soaked in sweat and flushed. She stares down at Bellamy, hardening her gaze to stone to mask the fear and he watches her, unsure of what she’s going to do.

When he notices how much her legs are shaking, her knees buckling over and over, he shifts all of his weight onto one side and stands up, shuffling towards her awkwardly. The second he’s within reaching distance though, Clarke collapses to the ground, unable to hold herself up any longer, and her head smashes against the ground with all the force of a thousand nightmares.

It’d be enough to knock her out cold if she weren’t so afraid to close her eyes. Instead, she tucks her chin into her neck and breathes in the dewy grass, gritting her teeth together so hard she feels them start to crack.

“Clarke,” she hears, a delicate whisper spoken softly into her ear and she’s never heard him sound like this before.

“Don’t touch me,” she says angrily. Her voice is painfully broken and hoarse.

She feels his weight land next to hers. His arm brushes her caved shoulder and she whimpers away from it. She knows that once she recovers from whatever this is, she’ll be fuming with how weak she has made herself look.

“You’re okay, Clarke,” he tries again. “It was just a dream. It was only in your head, Princess,”

“Bellamy,” she mewls, quietly into the ground.

A warmth rests gently against her back, his hand working its way across her spine in barely-there touches. She moves infinitesimally closer to the contact, and he takes the invitation to bring the full weight of her body over to him so that she’s still got her face pressed into the cold dirt, but his arm is slung across her back and is cradling her softly.

“Don’t touch me,” she bites again, but before he has the chance to move away, she lets out an uncontrollable sob and masks it in the material of his trouser leg. She presses her forehead into his thigh to stop from crying.

He wordlessly lifts her up, bringing her head so that she can tuck it into the crevice between his collar bone and neck.

They sit, for enough time to watch the moon drift from its position towering above them to where it lies, horizontal to their line of sight, before either of them speak.

“I get them too,” he whispers faintly.

Clarke focuses on the sound of his pulse in the silence.

“I don’t want this,” she whimpers.

His fingers take to rubbing smooth circles across her side. She can tell he doesn’t know what to say. She wouldn’t know what to say either.

“I’m glad we found you,” he decides upon a while later. Always a man of few words and Clarke isn’t really sure why he’s saying it, but it makes her fingers stop shaking so violently and she manages to steady her breathing to match his.

“I think it was us who found you,” she grimaces, trying to find a smile despite the lump in her throat.

“Maybe,” he hums. “Either way, I’m glad,”

“Yeah,” she says, reaching around to hold him tighter because tonight she hasn’t got enough energy to fight. “Me too,”

 

…

 

He doesn’t bring it up again, which Clarke is thankful for. And when they set off to head further north, she hangs back to walk side by side with him even if she thinks it’s just because he might need help hobbling along. No other reason than that.

 

…

 

The hit Nebraska a week and a half later.

It hits her, on the tenth day that she spends with the Blake siblings, that she trusts them now. It happens when they get jumped on by a kid; the pigtails on either side of her head losing larger clumps of hair than what still remains.

It catches Raven’s foot out of nowhere and floors her before Clarke can take in what’s happening- distracted with the sound of a bird of prey flying somewhere near to them. It’s Bellamy who boots the kid away from them, with the leg that has almost fully healed by now, and when it starts to scramble towards them again, unaffected by the force with which he kicked her head, Octavia shoots it through its teeth.

If she can trust them with Raven’s life, she can trust them with hers.

They’re a week ahead of where they’d thought they’d be by now, but it doesn’t lift spirits like it should do. The closer they have become to Nebraska, the more bones they’ve stumbled upon and the more kills they’ve had to make.

The night after they get attacked by a teenager- no older than fourteen- Raven tells Octavia and Bellamy about how Isaac died. Clarke has already heard the story and would much rather not have to hear about how the brunette was forced to watch her younger brother shoot himself in the head, but nonetheless she sits by Raven’s side and takes her hand as she tells the story to a campfire that’s sparking and crackling up to the sky.

Along the way, Clarke has found that she’s become a bit of a magpie; she’s been taking little facts about the Blake siblings now and then and hiding them away to store away in the little treasure chest of memories.

Like the fact that Octavia can break the legs of a man twice her size within twenty seconds. And that Bellamy found a typewriter in the trash when he was twelve, then spent two months trying to restore it. When he eventually figured it out, he locked himself in his room for days writing what he calls his ‘first ever novel’.

Nobody ever got to read it though because he set fire to it five hours after he deemed it finished.

She’s also learnt that Octavia didn’t start elementary until third grade- the same year her father left-which Clarke admires incessantly.

And in return for the gems that she keeps, she shares her own.

Like how she tells Octavia, after two days of nagging, that the most expensive dress she has ever worn was a $3500 Gucci dress that was made of white silk and covered with intricate lace patterns.

And how she only learnt to cook pasta when her microwave broke in her dorm at Stanford. And that she fainted the first time they had to dissect a frog in Biology- when the teacher made them locate the heart.

It’s been nice, having someone there on either side. She knows that without them, her and Raven would have been okay together, because they’re a team in search for its missing member. However, Clarke likes to think that they’ve formed their own kind of team with the two Bostonians from the wrong side of the tracks.

They’re dancing across the hoods- the only thing they can stomach when they’re crossing the more urban areas, out of the woods- with Clarke teaching Bellamy her chain game while Octavia seems to be seeing how far she can make a jump between two cars.

It’s a distraction from the thought of the ruined safe house and after a couple hours of playing, they’ve managed to turn it into a frenzied competition. Because not a day goes by where Clarke and Bellamy don’t bicker about _something_. Like when he argues that D.C. is better than Marvel and she begins to think he is clinically insane. Or when she tells him that the U.K. Office is infinitely better than the U.S. Office and he informs her that while he appreciates the fact that the U.K. hold the legacy, she is just plain wrong.

But it’s never malicious and they’re always sort of half laughing about it by the end, even if Bellamy does sulk around for like an hour after.

“That’s eight Volkswagens in a row! Beat that Princess,” he smirks and raises his voice so that she can hear him two cars down. She had to fall behind a moment ago because an arrow fell out of her quiver when she tried to make a particularly lengthy jump and she had to break her own streak of brands to get it.

“Nice try Bellamy, we both know that silver one is a Peugeot,”

“No, _that_ silver one is a Peugeot. I used that one,” he says pointing to two cars on opposite lanes and she rolls her eyes, letting him have the victory. She made six Fords in a row earlier and had gloated about it for an hour.

“For someone who claims he doesn’t dance, you’re getting pretty into this,” she says, more to herself than to him. She decides to keep the observation as one of the gems she’s stolen.

“Hate to break it to you Clarke, but this isn’t dancing,” he counters, sliding down the bonnet of a beetle with ease.

“You just keep telling yourself that,” she laughs.

She won’t tell him that she’d swear she’s seen some of the moves he’s pulled out here in Dirty Dancing.

He stops for a moment to take off his bag, probably to get something to eat. They crashed a gas station yesterday and scavenged the last few packets of nuts and crackers from the stock room. Raven had to get up close and personal to a walker when she reached for a packet of Oreos, but it turned out to be worth it when they tasted the sweetest thing they’d had in days. Even if they were incredibly stale.

Clarke takes the opportunity to overtake him, gliding with ease past him and as she brushes by, he scoffs in mock outrage. Raven turns to look behind her, torn between catching up with Octavia and waiting up for the other two but Clarke shrugs as a way of letting her know they’re okay.

They’re quite far apart, so Clarke can’t quite make out the facial expression she makes, but it’s one she hasn’t seen before. Like Raven knows something that Clarke should know too but doesn’t.

Clarke stops to figure it out and gets thrown forwards by something colliding into her pack.

Bellamy’s low grunt of surprise is all she hears before his hands have wrapped snug around her waist and he’s spun her around, holding her tight into his chest so that her bow is wedged awkwardly between them.

It’s the only way he could have caught her with such short warning and she’s thankful that he didn’t let her fall, but he’s holding her so close to him that she can taste his breath and count the freckles lining his cheeks.

“Remember this?” He asks, nodding down to their joined bodies. She doesn’t get it for a split-second and the instant he realizes what it must sound like his neck turns beet red, but it clicks for Clarke soon after. Still he tries to stammer out an explanation: “The night we met?”

“Um, yeah,” she says, entranced by the way his ears drift from warm tan to the softest blush.

The edge of her bow is pressing into her thigh almost painfully but if she were to move it then he’d probably take his arms away and Clarke isn’t sure she won’t fall back down if he lets go right now.

Her hands have fallen to rest against his chest.

He grimaces for a moment but it’s not brief enough for her to ignore it.

“How’s your foot?” she asks, and she may just be using that as an excuse to glance down at their joint hips.

“Feels like I kicked a brick wall,”

“That’s understandable,” she considers. “Maybe you should stick to that story?”

“Why?” he furrows his brow in confusion.

“It’s more manly than ‘I fucked my ankle picking flowers,’” she mock whispers, as though it’s a secret.

“I’ll have you know I’m perfectly comfortable with my manhood,” he whispers back.

“Sure you are, Blake,”

She pats his chest again, pretending to comfort him.

“You need a haircut,”

He laughs briefly before he takes one of his hands from her waist, imperceptibly tightening his hold with the other- just in case. She isn’t sure what he’s doing until he waves his hand in front of her face.

“I was just getting this out,” he says sheepishly.

It’s the tiara that she’d been wearing for the first couple of days, still missing a few jewels and ever fading into a muddy brown color, but her tiara all the same.

She’d taken it out of her hair when she’d cleaned off in the river and must’ve left it on the rock when she had. She doesn’t know if it was him who picked it up, or why he would have but he has it now and Clarke doesn’t know what to make of that.

“I found it,” he quietens.

“Good to see you still have eyes,” she smirks, taking it.

“Yeah well I thought you might want it back?”

“Why?” she asks.

“You’re right,” he bristles all of a sudden, snatching it and taking a couple steps back, as many as he can on the top of a three-door car. “It was stupid,”

“I meant why now?” she laughs, pushing at his shoulder. “Are you always this dramatic?”

He rolls his eyes but extends his arm and lets her have the small crown, a small smile forming on his face.

“Not always,”

“Here,” she says and before he can stop her, she’s breaking it in half, down the axis where the centerpiece gemstone should be. It’s a clean snap and she holds one of the pieces out to Bellamy expectantly. “We’ll share,”

He takes the one she’s holding out, but he leans forward and slides it into her hair, detangling a few knots so that it stays in place. Then, wordlessly, he takes the other and rests it on his own head. He takes a few steps back to strike a pose and Clarke assesses the look for a moment, doing her best Miranda Preesly impression before she breaks into a toothy grin and doesn’t bother to restrain the laugh.

It doesn’t sound like her. It’s good.

And then she sees him return her grin, all teeth and no shame- so different to how he normally lets himself smile- and he emits a low chuckle. And Clarke decides it’s great.

“Still confident in your own manhood now, Bell?”

She can’t help herself. And if he falters at the nickname for just a second, flashing just a glimpse of astonishment, then Clarke chooses to store that moment away too.

 

…

 

Octavia is the one to find the _Welcome to Nebraska_ sign.

It started raining about an hour ago, so they had to take to walking along the edge of the highway, on the inside of the barricade which slows them down because now they have to maneuver around all the cars.

Nobody is talking much- the rain seems to have that affect- so they don’t address the sign, but it hangs in the back of their minds like a bad smell.

Nature has picked the worst day to fuck with them because they know that here, there’s going to be twice as many walkers roaming the city and with the sounds of hail against metal ceilings, they can barely hear anything.

Clarke has heard the occasional alarm bell, but it’s been far enough away for them to keep going.

No-one mentions the safehouse but there isn’t much to say anyway.

They set up camp against a school bus, after checking both inside and under the bus for any strays. They don’t bother making a fire; they wouldn’t find any dry wood if they tried anyway. And sometimes it’s not worth the risk.

Clarke offers to take first watch because she’d rather be alert on the highway. There’s a lot more exposure than when they’re in the woods.

She writes a mental letter to Wells while they’re settling in, something she hasn’t done since they ran into Bellamy and Octavia, so she takes her time to tell him about them and it makes her feel a bit better.

She doesn’t tell him about her dream. He doesn’t need to know.

The rain doesn’t stop and Raven falls asleep curled against Clarke’s leg. Bellamy sits down to lean next to Clarke against the side of the bus and Octavia rests her head on his shoulder before she’s out.

He doesn’t go to sleep like she expects him to, but his eyes are closed.

“At least we can see the stars tonight,” he says out of nowhere.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he shrugs. “They just haven’t been out in a while,”

“I guess,” she nods, caught up in her own head.

He lifts his arm and points ahead of him, his finger tracing the fireflies in the sky.

“You see that cluster over there? The one that kind of looks like a C?”

She follows the movement of his hand, how it curves to mirror the shape of the stars.

“That’s the Corona Borealis. Remember that myth about the Minotaur in the labyrinth?”

Clarke nods her head and waits for him to go on, curious as to where his mind is wondering.

“Theseus, to protect the children of Athens from King Minos, volunteered to kill the monster. During the preparation he fell in love with King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne who-  blinded by affection- helped Theseus outsmart the labyrinth.

She gave him a ball of thread that he could use to find his way back out once he’d overpowered the minotaur and when he came back, he eloped with Adriane, taking with him the saved Athenians.

She not only helped him kill her half-brother, she left everything she knew for him but during a pit stop on an island, Athena woke Theseus and told him that he had to leave Adriane for Dionysus, because they were intruding on his island.”

He says, completely absorbed in the night sky. He’s telling the story with such ease that Clarke can tell he’s in his element. She closes her eyes to listen to his words, letting the familiarity drift over her.

“He took off, leaving Adriane still fast asleep in their bed and he never returned with an explanation. She was devastated. It’s said that she climbed the steepest mountains to trace him along the horizon and ran out into the ocean to wait for him.

That’s when Dionysus found her, sat on a rock waiting for the man who abandoned her. His heart melted when he saw her and he instantly fell in love, deciding to marry her on the spot.

People speculate where her crown came from, but once they were married, Dionysus tossed it into the sky and let the jewels dissolve into stars,”

She opens her eyes to look at the constellation he’s pointing to, and she sees it now, the shape of a crown adorned with celestial gems.

“That’s it,” he whispers. “That’s her crown.”

Raven stirs and tucks into Clarke’s leg some more, their soaking wet trousers intertwined and once she’s settled, Clarke hums lightly: “Immortal,”

He rests his head back, perfectly calm against the school bus, still watching the sky.

“Dionysus kind of sounds like a dick,”

He chuckles quietly before turning his head, his eyebrow arched all amused and quizzical.

“You think?”

“Well, yeah. He split them apart. He used his power to make her marry him. That’s not love,”

“I think she fell in love with him too, eventually. Who knows if she loved him as much though?”

“That’s not the point. She _chose_ Theseus,” she says as though it’s obvious.

“Theseus left her, Clarke. He abandoned her- I wouldn’t exactly call that love,” he retaliates, unconvinced, and looks at her, more confused at her outlook than anything.

She considers him for a moment while he carries on.

“You don’t just run away. You don’t just take the coward’s way out, not with this. He should have stayed and fought for her if he really cared,”

“How do you know so much about this stuff anyway?” she asks, aiming for nonchalance but the mystery gets the better of her and she succumbs to her own curiosity.

He sighs but humors her, smug at the thought that she’s let him win.

“My mom, she uh wasn’t around a lot when O was a kid. You could say she worked nights,” he answers as he clears his throat and smiles humorlessly at the joke only he understands. “And she didn’t really hang around with the right people, so I’d tell O to hide under the floorboards of my room,”

Clarke doesn’t ask why they needed to go to such extremes, because if he wants to tell her then he will, and she won’t push that.

“It wasn’t the most comfortable thing so I’d have to tell her stories until she could fall asleep. It’d take hours and I ran out of the generic fairy-tale material pretty quickly, so I started telling her the stories from my AP mythology classes. And then I ran out of those, so I started making them up,”

“Is that how you decided to become a writer?”

“I guess so. But even before that, I was never any good at anything else,”

Clarke snorts loudly and he shoots her a side-eye to let her know he genuinely believes what he’s saying.

“You’re right,” she says finally.

“About what?”

“He should have fought for her,”

The smugness scrawled across his face becomes almost sickening and Clarke finds herself unable to stop herself from smirking alongside him.

His eyeline lifts, as though he’s trying to remember something and when he iterates the line from a page of a book she knows she’ll never get to read, Clarke feels the air shift.

“ _No sooner did she lower from him her incandescent eyes, than she conceived throughout her body a flame, and totally, to the center of her bones, she burned_.”

He’s smiling at her softly, barely there, but it’s impossible not to mirror it. It’s a good thing no one is around to see them: getting caught smiling goofily at each other would probably be a bit embarrassing.

“Good night, Bellamy,” she says, making no move to settle down so that he takes the hint to get some sleep.

“Good night Clarke,” he returns and shuffles down a bit to rest his head on his sister’s, falling asleep with the ghost of a smile still on his face.

 

…

 

Clarke stays up, her mind quiet for the first few hours as she lets her hair reach maximum absorbency. Soon she won’t remember what it feels like to be dry.

But then her thoughts start to wonder, and she can’t help it; once the idea is there it sticks like glue and she knows she won’t shake it any time soon.

She’s got fifteen arrows left, from what she’s managed to salvage from their surprise attacks and that’s almost half of what she had two weeks ago. The others are steadily running out of bullets.

Plus, they all know that winter is coming, closing in like a literal dark cloud and they aren’t going to make it with just the stuff they’ve got. They’re all shivering already and it’s not even November yet. The further up north they get, the colder it’s going to become.

And absolutely none of that matters when she has the thought: if there is anybody still alive in that safe house, even one, then not going to there would be as good as murder. The odds that someone made it are slim to none, but if there were people alive there at some point then there is every possibility that _someone_ could have made it.

Her mind is made up before the sun starts to rise.

She’s going and whether she has to do it alone doesn’t matter.

Her naïve side convinces her that she could catch the others up eventually. But it’s a done deal when she thinks about the families that must have sought asylum at one of the only secure bases in the northern hemisphere.

She wakes Raven an hour before sunrise, having lost track of time and hoping that if she gets at least a couple hours of sleep, then Raven won’t be mad.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Sing me to sleep, and then leave me alone,'  
> \- Asleep, The Smiths


	5. With the wild wolves around you

“So, I’ve been thinking,” Clarke starts over breakfast the next day. Well, a handful of cashews and some currants.

“Sounds dangerous,” Raven smirks, twirling Octavia’s pistol around her finger.

“I have an idea, and it’s a huge risk so I would totally get it if I’m just going crazy thinking this might work but-“

“Spit it out, Clarke,”

“I think we should try the safe house,” she says, rushing the words out in one quick exhale.

She thinks they manage to decipher what she says though, if Bellamy’s spit take is anything to go by.

“You what?!” He asks, incredulous.

Before he lets her explain herself, he’s already stood up and stalking over to where the three of them are huddled over their packs.

“Clarke the last we heard that place was practically crawling with walkers. The base was massacred. What do you expect to find?”

She breathes in deeply before she answers.

“I know there’s no one left Bellamy, okay I know that. But I can’t help the fact that there might be the smallest chance someone made it out. I can’t just walk past it without making sure we aren’t leaving behind a survivor,”

“We wouldn’t be walking past it Clarke. We’d be giving it a wide birth,” Raven interjects.

“And that isn’t the only reason,” she continues, brushing the comment off. “Winter is coming, and we aren’t going to last just carrying the clothes we’ve got now. And as much as we want to deny it, we’re all running low on ammo.

If the safe house was eliminated, then there is every chance that the walkers simply went to find meat somewhere else. They won’t stick around once they’ve cleaned the place out.”

Raven snorts, probably at Clarke’s naivety.

“If there were just two of us then I’d never suggest it. But we’ve got four fit, experienced fighters, all with advanced knowledge in at least some kind of field of combat.

If anyone can make it in and out alive, then it’s going to be us,”

It’s still raining this morning, and no one talks over the sound of the droplets pattering against the roofs.

“It’s just too much of a risk, Clarke,” Bellamy shrugs gruffly.

“Then how long are we going to last?” She stands, losing her patience. “Raven? You’re blue and it’s not even winter yet,”

Bellamy rises to meet her, stepping forward and reaching like he’s about to hold her shoulders but he thinks better of it and instead, looks to her gaze.

“Every time I have to look at one of those things, I want to claw my own eyes out,” he begins, his voice low and threatening.

Clarke would be intimidated if it were anybody else; not him though. She’s not scared of him. “And every time I kill one another piece of me dies. I know you feel that too, Princess,” he says, dipping his head barely an inch. “I can see it in you,”

Clarke doesn’t back away, like she’s sure he expects her to.

“And if we don’t at least try to find survivors then leaving them behind will be the same as killing them too,”

“And what are we going to do then, Clarke?  If by some miracle we do get someone out of there it’ll just be another mouth to feed, another back to protect,”

“You said you didn’t want to lose your humanity!” she says, shoving his arm away. “Well, Bellamy, this is me not losing mine,”

“I also said that eventually some things become more important,” he replies, and she can hear the agitation growing in his tone.

“Like what for instance?” she is raising her voice, something she had been planning to avoid if at all possible, but she can’t help it.

“Like _you_ for instance!” he shouts out of nowhere and it leaves her speechless, unable to take her gaze away from the way his eyes are flaming.

Octavia and Raven are holding their breaths, shocked just as much as she is. “And O,” he reinforces after a moment. “And Raven.”

Clarke stumbles back slightly, thrown by the proximity, and she reclaims her seat in between the other two, still wordless.

He stays where he is, looking down at her expectantly.

“I need more arrows. You guys need all the bullets you can get. With no weapons we can’t even hunt, let alone defend ourselves.

And I _am_ right about the weather; our packs are barely half full. We need more clothes, and I need to make sure I’m not leaving anyone behind.

If I’m the only one who wants to do this then I understand. But I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think we could make it out alive,”

The rest of them remain silent and so Clarke finishes her rant with a final “together,” and takes it as her cue to wait, and wait some more for a response.

“I want to do it,” Octavia whispers, her voice barely audible over the rain.

“No,” Bellamy says, kind of desperately. “Octavia, no.”

“You two have gone clinically insane,” Raven mumbles.

It’s Octavia’s turn to stand up, like they’re doing some kind of debate class, and she looks to both Raven and Bellamy, her gaze set and determined.

“And what do we do when we can’t defend ourselves anymore? Or when you lose a toe from frostbite?”

“We make do, O!” Raven says, finally losing the monotonous drawl which Clarke is thankful for. At least now they can all get it out there. “We figure it out because that is what we do! We don’t become reckless idiots with no regard for our own lives,”

“It’s not reckless- if anything it’s logical,”

“You don’t even know that we’ll find what you’re looking for,” Bellamy sighs, tearing his hand through his hair, soaking wet.

“Please, it’s a military base. I’d bet my life there’ll be something that would come in handy,” Clarke answers, rolling her eyes.

“Yeah well that’s what you’d be doing, Clarke,”

“She isn’t the only one who’s been thinking about this! You two,” Octavia taunts, pointing her fingers either side of Clarke, accusatory in a way she hasn’t seen the brunette before. “are the ones so adamant that you want to stay true to who you are!”

Bellamy walks over to his sister, taking her hand to calm her down.

“The woods are one risk; the highway is another. Even the malls I can deal with because they are what _I_ would call necessary. But this isn’t something we need. And there is no way I’m going to walk into the eye of one of the biggest hordes in the U.S. for a couple of fleeces or a gun, or any other person,”

“Then I’ll go alone,” Clarke decides. “I can find you guys again afterwards and-“

“Don’t you dare try to emotionally blackmail us,” Raven huffs. “You know that’s not an option; the only way we’re splitting up is if one of us dies,”

“I’m not trying to blackmail you. I just can’t run away from this,”

“Me neither,” Octavia says quietly.

Bellamy sighs low and frustrated before he takes off, turning sharply around the side of the bus, almost shoving past it as though it’ll move out of his way.

It takes a while for any of them to speak again. They’re all mapping out every risk they might encounter and making their own decisions on whether each step would be worth it.

It’s Raven who speaks eventually, calm and calculating like she’s thought each word out- which she probably has.

“The first sign of danger and we’re out of there,” and she’s looking at Clarke like she’s never been so sure of anything.

“Of course,” she nods unthinkingly.

“And no funny business,” Raven carries on, looking around the makeshift camp and jerking her head over to the school bus, behind which Bellamy is hiding. “No jumping in front of anybody else at the last second. We are responsible for our own lives,”

“Yep,” Octavia nods, determined.

Bellamy comes back from the other side of the bus now, his hair all over the place like he’s been pulling at it for the last hour.

Its almost feral look reminds Clarke of something not so platonic and she hopes he’s thinking too much for him to notice the blush that rises through her cheeks.

“And no going back for anybody. We need to be smart about this,” he says slowly. “Minimize the casualties,”

“Okay,” Clarke shrugs, a lump forming in her throat at his words.

“So, we’re going then?” Octavia asks, perking up a bit. “Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Raven grimaces but the look she sends to Clarke lets her know that she’s willing to take this risk. “We’re a team. And that means we stick together,”

 

…

 

On Raven’s condition, they take a couple hours out of the day to make a plan of action.

The raining hasn’t stopped, and the sky doesn’t look like it’s going to ease up any time soon, but the school bus provides a little shelter.

Octavia proposes they split up so that they can scour the place in half the time, but that idea is quickly shot down by her companions.

Having no prior knowledge to the base really doesn’t help; the only reason they know how to get there is thanks to the road signs that lead the way deep into the heart of Omaha.

Bellamy decides that they’re to scout the premises before they even think about heading inside, so that they know of all the exits in the event of a surprise.

Not that they don’t expect surprises.

They set off when the hail starts to ease and continue walking in single file along the barricade. The plan is to stop halfway and make camp during the early evening; that way they’ll all be able to eat properly and get a good night’s sleep.

It’s quiet because they all understand that there is a strong possibility tonight will be their last night as the four of them.

Clarke admits to herself, when Octavia offers to take over the rear watch, that she would do anything to keep their small group together, to make sure that they get through this.

Bellamy doesn’t seem to be holding anything against her which surprises Clarke because she understands that this is a risk he wouldn’t choose to take. Maybe he’s realized that he needs it just as much as she does, because as much as he’d like to deny it, Clarke has noticed that looking after people comes as naturally as breathing to him.

If it’s to help Raven when they’re crossing the occasional stream, or if it’s to go out of his way to make sure that everyone’s boots are cleaned each time they find water.

They pass under a bridge along the highway a couple hours before nightfall and decide that this would be the best place to set up camp for the night, as it provides as much shelter as they’re going to get in this weather.

There’s a dry patch tucked into the end support with a radius no greater than a meter, so they have to huddle up into it, knees bumping and elbows grazing like they’re in some sort of cultic circle.

Clarke takes first watch again, promising to get some sleep when the sun sets, and when she receives no arguments, she assumes her companions will fall asleep readily.

Bellamy makes no move to lie down, though, and instead chooses to mirror last night. The stars aren’t visible through all the clouds, but he talks to her about everything and nothing at the same time.

They share stories in the forms of relics, and when she makes him laugh there is no trace of bitterness or shame in his smiles.

It’s what they both need, Clarke supposes. Because she’s not an idiot; she knows that they’re both planning the same thing.

“I know what you’re thinking, Bellamy,” she sighs after some time, unable to leave their unspoken agreement alone anymore. “Don’t do it,”

He grimaces when he realizes what she’s referring to, but he doesn’t look surprised. He must’ve known they’d have to have this conversation at some point.

“You are worth a lot more to that girl alive, than you are dead,”

He shuffles but stays silent.

“And we can’t both leave them,” she adds.

He looks up at her, almost like he’s been stung.

“And what makes you think you have any right to choose who lives and who dies, Princess?” he says more confused than malicious.

“This was my idea,” she answers, resolute. “And nobody needs me like she needs you,” she adds as though it’s an afterthought.

Clarke doesn’t give him a chance to reply. She knows he’ll only try to convince her in his own twisted way that her life is worth as much as his, and she doesn’t think she can stand to hear any lies tonight. Especially not from him.

She shuffles down against her pack and lets her eyes relax, still half open but hooded. It’s getting too dark to see anything clearly, but she can make out the glint of his eyes watching her curiously.

They’ve always got that shine in them, one that finds a reflection even in the darkest shadows.

Clarke decides, once she’s fallen into that state of semi-unconsciousness, where her body has accepted sleep but her mind is still stumbling around, that his face is kind of beautiful.

It doesn’t take away his incessant stubbornness, or the fact that she knows she’s the last person he’d want to be around right now, regardless of the appeasements he made down by the river.

It doesn’t take away his abrasiveness or how Clarke can never quite get a read on what he’s really thinking, but his face…

It’s kind of beautiful.

And he’s still watching her when she lets her mind fall into sleep completely.

 

…

 

Clarke is holding on to Raven’s hand when they arrive at the outskirts of the safehouse, trying to imprint what her skin feels like to her memory just in case this is the last time she’ll ever get to feel it.

The building is nothing like they expected: the tall brick walls tinted red and brown and all shades in between.

There are few windows, and those that are left are absent of any glass. There’s a chimney on top of the tiered roof but there is no smoke coming out of it, and yet the smell of charred meat lingers, wafting throughout the circumference of the base.

Clarke would believe it was some sort of nineteenth century hospital, or a boarding prep school, but not this.

This doesn’t look like the sort of place that guns are fired and battle plans strategized. This doesn’t look like a place in which men were sent off to foreign countries never to return.

Instead it looks like it would earn the word safehouse, if it weren’t for the barbed wire fenced that encloses it, gaping holes hanging through it like bullet wounds.

At least the fence is one less thing they have to worry about: there are plenty of gaps through it, as far as the eye can see so at least this won’t be there downfall.

Octavia reaches down to her boot, when they reach the fence, and drops her penknife carefully onto a particularly nasty knot of wire. It doesn’t snap, or crack, or show any signs of electrical conductivity so the power must be cut.

No-one makes a move to fit through it though, they just stand there watching the building for a while, as though it might come alive if they look at it for long enough.

Raven’s hand feels clammy in Clarke’s but it’s steady, and her other is holding her rifle close to her chest, her finger lingering on the trigger.

Clarke reluctantly takes her hand back, so she can load her bow.

They’re waiting for something, all of them surrounded by the still thundering rain. Maybe for any sign of another survivor, or maybe for a chance to run away. Either way, nothing comes.

“It’s now or never,” Octavia whispers, her voice barely quivering and she takes the first step over the boundary, careful not to catch her trouser leg in the shredded wires.

Her brother follows diligently after, almost like he doesn’t seem to notice that he’s practically clinging on to her arm.

“You know the plan,” he says, turning to help Raven and Clarke through the fence. They don’t even try to shrug him off; now is not the time for a pissing contest. “Raven take the rear; Clarke get in front. Me and O will take the sides,”

He’s instructing like he hasn’t already said this a dozen times.

They form up, covering all angles, and tread carefully, sticking to the shadows against the building. Clarke quickly takes on her hunter mindset- one she hasn’t had to channel so intensely for a long time- because there is no doubt in her mind that they’re going to be in danger, and she can prepare for that accordingly now.

But the wasteland she’s tracing is nothing like the woods that settled outside her father’s home. And the starlight that seems to be coming from nowhere is nothing like the sunbeams that would dance sweetly against their lake.

And she isn’t tracking rabbits this time, or deer. And her father, as much as she feels he needs to be here on her left once more, is gone.

Instead Bellamy is next to her, leaning firmly on her shoulder. Maybe because he doesn’t realize he needs it or maybe because he knows she does. And Octavia is breathing heavily into her other ear, a cooling presence, chilling the sweat that is beginning to bead down Clarke’s neck.

And maybe this can be good enough.

They find four fire exits on their way around the base, three with the doors completely of the hinges, and one still locked firmly.

When Clarke tries to get a look inside the three corridors that lead up to the exits, she sees nothing but darkness.

It’s the locked door that is most intimidating, and she takes note that they’ll have to avoid the eastern section of the building because they’ll easily get trapped if they linger around there for long.

And there could be anything behind that door.

The smell of burning is at its peak when they reach the door too, which only makes things worse.

They take their time choosing which way to go in but eventually, Clarke takes the first step into the blackened corridor- the one that bisects the building from the back.

It’s silent, apart from the sounds of their own breathing. It’s too dark to see her own feet and she trips a couple of times over God knows what.

The first room they get to seems to be some sort of cafeteria, like a mess hall, that could easily fit a thousand people inside. The smell is rancid, with bodies carved to the bone, barely leaving an inch of ground space free of blood.

There’s no movement between the carcasses, there probably isn’t enough flesh left on the skeletons for the bodies to reanimate.

Clarke steps forward, her hair damp with icy sweat, and she has to resist the urge to gag at the sight of the massacre.

She feels something graze her arm and flinches until she sees it’s Bellamy’s pinky finger, reaching out for Something to hold on to. She leans into his hand for a moment to let him know she’s still there, then breaks out of their diamond shape to scout the room.

They’re searching for survivors, but from looking at the condition the bodies have been left in, they won’t find anybody who would want to be saved.

“You were right,” Raven whispers, walking carefully over to the only window in the room. It looks like it’s been painted black by the night sky. “Nebraska is gone,”

The silence in the room is enough to give away that they’re the only ones breathing and so Clarke nods for them to leave.

“The weapons will be kept downstairs,” Bellamy breathes when they close the door on the graveyard. “Everything like that was kept in the basement at the base I trained at,”

Clarke nods for him to lead the way, wanting to be as far away from the mess hall as possible.

He finds the stairs that lead underground easily.

Clarke jumps when she sees something move in the corner of her eye and she shoots at it before she considers what she’s doing. It’s a skunk; small and young with no meat on it and she sulks over to it, yanking the arrow out of its eye.

Raven claps her on the shoulder before moving them all along.

The next ten minutes are a bit of a blur, with Clarke thinking about nothing but the need to defend them.

She can’t even register where they are because she trusts that Bellamy will take them where they need to go, so the only thing she can focus on is the angle that her bow is at, and the tension she’s placing on the string.

It’s the sound of Octavia’s choke that lets Clarke know they’ve found what they need.

Bellamy has kicked open a locker to reveal four shotguns with at least six dozen rounds and the three of them scramble to reach for whatever they can find. Clarke keeps watch while they scavenge for parts, taking their time to find the bullets that will fit to their own guns.

They’re in a narrow room, lined with freezer-like bins and Clarke waits for Octavia to turn over each one individually, pocketing all sorts of knives and assorted weapons like they’re pick-and-mix candy.

It’s one of the last bins that makes Clarke hold her breath: when Octavia pulls her hand out of one of the smallest and furthest at the back, with her follows a black leather quiver- its shape cut at jutting angles and curved like a wing- filled with countless arrows.

Their shafts are raven black and the woven feather ends are strung with shadowed yarn. Octavia pulls out one and the arrowhead is just as dark, however as she spins it in her fingers, a reflective aluminum strip is revealed which will definitely come in handy when she has to shoot in the dark.

Clarke has to ignore the urge to throw herself over there, and instead trusts Octavia to find what she knows she’ll need. The brunette takes off her pack once more, hurriedly, and shoves in the quiver before leaning waist-deep into the bin again and pulling out an identical one, letting that join its twin.

If Clarke weren’t overthinking every sound she hears, she’d feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude to the brunette for searching for the arrows and bagging them like they weigh nothing instead of prioritizing her own weapons.

It’s lucky Clarke is able to shove those emotions down.

After taking their time to make sure they have everything they need, they regroup at the entrance to the weapons store.

“Everyone okay?” Bellamy asks, his voice perfectly steady.

“Sure,” Raven nods, her throat bobbing. “What’s the plan?”

“We need to find some warmer clothes,” Octavia says and looks around the room, not that they can see much over six feet in front of them.

“They’ll probably be down here somewhere,” Bellamy answers.

He leans out of the room and turns his head to each side down the unlit corridor.

“We don’t have time to look in every room,”

They agreed they wouldn’t spend more than a couple hours here.

“Then we’re going to have to split up,” Clarke shrugs.

“Clarke,” Raven warns, voice low but Clarke dismisses her with a wave of her hand, which becomes difficult with both occupied.

“I think if there’s going to be anyone left, the top floor is the best bet. Give me twenty minutes and if I find nothing, I promise I’ll come back,”

“I thought we agreed we wouldn’t split up?”

“Trust me, Raven,” she pleads gently.

Clarke looks to Bellamy and he’s watching her quizzically, like he’s trying to figure out which way he should lean.

She sends him a look that takes away the need to say everything she wants to and the grimace he sends his way makes her breathe a sigh of relief.

“I’ll come with you,” he says, decided.

“You don’t have to do that,”

“I know,”

“Me and Raven will try to find some layers and we can meet back at the mess?” Octavia asks.

“No, I can’t go near that again,” he shudders.

“Meet at the entrance we came through,” Clarke says firmly. “Remember, no funny business. Once you’re outside we do not go back in,”

“That goes for everyone,” Raven says, looking at her pointedly.

Clarke nods and turns to Bellamy, raising her eyebrows to ask if he’s ready to go.

He gestures for her to lead the way, then hangs back to stride over to his sister and wrap her up on a bone-crushing hug. It only lasts a second or two and then he’s pulling away and joining Clarke at the entrance.

Clarke looks to Raven and Octavia, sharing lingering gazes with each; unspoken promises that she knows she can’t keep but they both nod to her, both saying they trust her more than they trust themselves.

It’s all she needs, to know that they’ll be okay.

Bellamy places his hand on her elbow as they move up the stairs- his gun upgraded to one from the cupboard.

They’re wordless, listening out for whatever noise they might be able to hear but his breathing surrounds her like a warm blanket. And when he squeezes her arm it shoots electric through her nerves.

“Top floor,” he affirms when they start to ascend the staircase they haven’t been up yet.

This corridor is lined with doors as far as the eye can see. All narrow, like they lead to college dorms.

They start to open each door confidently, not knowing what to expect on each side. Behind each one lies a group of bunkbeds and general bedroom furniture like wardrobes and desk chairs and mirrors that lie smashed.

There are no windows in any of the dorms, making them seem more like prison cells but after opening the first dozen, they come up empty, with no signs of anyone having lived here in years.

Clarke opens her thirteenth door and her gaze gets caught on something colorful and bright that sticks out like a sore thumb through the green sheets and brown furniture.

She, despite what she should really do, enters the room and walks towards the object, drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

When she reaches the first bed, she leans down and picks it up.

It’s a small, first sized doll with bright red hair and button green eyes, wearing an emerald frock. It’s been knitted out of yarn with the pigtails chewed slightly, the bright pink skin faded musky.

She can’t quit gripping it or staring at it like she should be catching on to something.

The kid who owned it must still be here, somewhere in the building and Clarke prays that she’s dead, because the alternative is too vile to deem that upon anyone, let alone a little girl.

Someone clears their throat from the doorway to the room and Clarke looks up to meet Bellamy’s eyes. She holds the doll out to him, guilty and unable to so much as feel the yarn in her hands anymore.

He shakes his head softly but steps forward and brings his hands up to her shoulders.

“Clarke,” he whispers, making her drop the doll so that it hits the ground with a low thump.

“Bellamy,”

“We need to keep moving,”

She nods, swallowing the lump in her throat, still disturbed by the abandoned doll.

“Aren’t you scared?” she asks and watches the scar on the corner of his lip stretch as he considers her.

He’s not pitying her, just observing her with a sadness deep in his eyes.

“Terrified,” he gushes, dropping his head low so that their eyes are level. His voice is raw.

“This was a mistake,”

Clarke pulls herself away from him roughly, bracing her hands on his arms because she can’t bring herself to let go completely.

“I shouldn’t have-“

He takes her in, and despite everything, he smiles ever so gently before cutting her off.

“No Clarke, you were right. Humanity, Princess, is the only thing that separates us from them,”

She looks deep into his eyes, his gaze a grounding force like he’s anchoring her to him, steady and secure.

Clarke breathes deeply, letting herself have just a few more moments in each other’s grasp, reading him as intensely as he’s reading her.

His hands pinch her shoulders firmly, squeezing and she knows he’s going to bruise her but it’s what she needs. A tight grip on reality.

“Let’s go,” he whispers reluctantly. “We need to be fighters today,”

She releases him and waits for him to let her go too. He falters, as though he’s forgotten what he’s supposed to be doing and shakes his head roughly, like he’s trying to clear his thoughts from his mind. Physically shaking them.

“Fighters,” she affirms and she’s not trying to reassure him, but he accepts it and they lead each other out of the room, leaving the doll once more.

This floor is barren. They’ve searched every room including each broom cupboard and have come up empty.

The clock is ticking, and Clarke contemplates turning to Bellamy and telling him there is no use in looking anymore.

But the next door she opens doesn’t lead to a closet, or a dorm room. Instead, she looks upon a dozen closed shower cubicles, a marbled window and a floor that has a water level at least a couple inches deep.

The bathroom must’ve flooded long before the water was cut.

She nods for Bellamy to follow her in, then takes a few wading steps forward. She opens each stall, slowly like she’s taking her time to open her Christmas presents in some sick way.

And then there’s a grunt, so low and deep and guttural that the next thing Clarke feels is Bellamy’s heavy hand landing harsh on her shoulder.

Clarke shrugs him off and raises her bow up higher to the door, fully prepared to shoot when she kicks it open.

She stills at the body sprawled on the tiled floor, soaked to the bone and clearly unconscious.

He looks around their age and his features resemble those of some sort of rodent.

But Clarke’s eyes stick to his neck like glue; more specifically, she can’t stop watching the lack of purple bulging veins or the way his chest is clearly rising up and down.

She can practically see the beat of his pulse. And she breathes a sigh of relief, because maybe this wasn’t all for nothing.

“Careful, Princess,” she hears low in her ear.

Clarke doesn’t take her eyes off the man whose arm is lying at a concerningly unnatural angle.

She steps toward him and understands that she needs to keep her distance so kicks his boot gently. Enough to wake him if he’s not been infected.

And sure enough, he jerks up and hits his head on the bottom of the toilet seat, making the sound echo throughout the stall.

He starts panicking instantly, his gaze flitting around to the enclosed space and his breath comes out in sporadic puffs of air.

It takes him a moment to notice the pair in front of him, and when he does the noise that erupts from low in his throat is completely unexpected.

He’s sniggering quietly to himself, but Clarke doesn’t get the joke. He meets her eyes and watches her frozen stance.

“Time’s up,”

His voice comes out hoarse and broken- he probably hasn’t had to speak in weeks. He doesn’t move to get away from them, just slumps and cradles his arm, resigned to whatever is about to happen.

Bellamy is the one to speak up, because Clarke is too busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

“We’re clean,”

The man’s smirk only widens further.

“Yeah sure, I’ve heard that one before,”

Clarke turns to Bellamy, her brow furrowed. He spares a glance to her and she notices how close they’re standing now.

He must’ve drifted more and more towards her in the last five seconds because he’s got one arm hanging loosely around her pack, the other clamped firmly on her forearm.

If Clarke were to lean her head forward even slightly, she’d butt his chin and she can feel his steady breath weave through her hair.

But she can’t think about that now, because they have no idea what they’re going to do with this one.

“What’s your name?” she asks softly.

“Why would I tell you?” he bristles, snarling and losing the humor in his voice.

“We don’t have time for this,” Bellamy huffs, and brings up his hand to thread through his hair.

Clarke takes the last few steps forward and crouches down so that her eyes become level with the stranger’s.

“We want to help you,” she says calmly.

“I don’t need your help,” he practically spits, and Clarke feels Bellamy’s hand shove her back so that she lands with her ass in the miniature pond.

It’s almost icy cold and Clarke doesn’t understand how the stranger hasn’t got blue lips, or how he’s managing not to shiver.

She looks up to see why she was thrown backwards. Bellamy has squeezed himself into the space between Clarke and the man, the muscles of his back tensed like they’re about to pop, towering down over him menacingly.

“Are you bitten?” He asks through clenched teeth.

The man smirks, venom lacing his lips.

“If I were, I wouldn’t be sat here waiting to turn, would I?” He snarls, then reveals the knife he has clenched in his injured hand.

He means he’d have killed himself by now; he’s clearly not trying to threaten them, regardless of the resemblance his face has to some sort of predator.

“Then you’re coming with us,” Bellamy decides, and the tone in his voice makes it clear he’s not to be argued with.

He moves to lift the man up, placing an arm under his shoulder but Clarke scrambles forward.

“Wait!” she scolds, noticing the stranger’s small wince. “He’s hurt,”

Bellamy rolls his eyes but backs away and gestures for Clarke to take over.

She shifts over to the man and feels along the arm that he hasn’t moved once, but she hasn’t got time to look at it properly so she awkwardly leans to his other side and helps him up out of the puddles.

He clearly hasn’t moved from this position in days because when he first stands to his feet, his knees buckle sharply, and his first step forward is more of just a slide of his foot.

He’s leaning most of his weight on to Clarke, probably not realizing how much so, and it’s a lot to take on considering the weight of her pack and the discomfort of her bow tucked under her arm.

Bellamy looks to her uncertain, everything he wants to say written in the warm honey of his eyes and the curl of his dimples.

She nods her head, because it’s okay and she can handle this. This was what she came for.

The man that is currently cutting off the blood circulation in half her body reeks of vomit and stale urine.

“Is this the moment I get sacrificed for some satanic ritual?” he grumbles when they figure their way out of the bathroom.

She snorts despite herself.

Bellamy comes up to her other side, bracing her with his hand on her waist awkwardly.

But there is a howl from the floor below them and she doesn’t get the time to thank him.

They all still, and Clarke almost forgets that the man can barely hold himself up because he almost topples over when she reaches behind her back to load her bow.

She looks to Bellamy and his mouth immediately forms an ‘O’ shape, his eyes fluttering closed in pain for a few seconds.

She reaches for his hand, rubbing her thumb over his fist, just a swipe of her skin against his and he’s back. And he’s ready to fight.

 

…

 

They sprint down the staircases silently, reaching the ground floor as the sounds intensify.

They’re coming from the basement and it’s an unspoken debate as to if they’re going to go down there.

Clarke starts to descend the staircase without so much as a glance to Bellamy.

He takes her wrist in his fingers sharply and spins her around.

“Clarke what the hell do you think you’re doing? We made a deal!” He gestures back to the way they came in as though he’d not even considered going any other way. She knows that’s not true though.

The slight glimmer in his eyes lets her know that, although she’s breaking the rules, he’s ready to follow her blindly as long it leads him to his sister.

“Bellamy, you and I both know that we were never going to leave them!” she replies, her voice carrying all the panic between them. She reaches for his arm, clutching it with both hands to try to get through to him.

He takes her in and the small gesture he makes with his gun points her in the direction she needs to go.

It doesn’t last long.

Something collides into Clarke with enough force that she’s knocked over, the long, almost dreaded brown hair smothering her to the point that she can’t breathe. But Octavia’s heart is thumping solidly against hers, so she doesn’t mind having to hold her lungs still.

“Clarke!” she gasps, then lifts herself up to look around for her brother in a fluster.

He’s there beside them undoubtedly, helping them both up to their feet. Clarke flips her head around to look for Raven, who is standing behind Octavia and panting.

Clarke close to jumps on to her. She holds her friend tightly so that their necks collide, and the embrace doesn’t last long because Raven starts explaining.

“We didn’t know. Every other room was clean and we thought there might be… we didn’t… Clarke they’re coming,” she decides upon.

She doesn’t even spare a glance to the hobbling man beside them.

“We need to go, now,” Bellamy almost shouts.

They form up, like they’re all hunched over a map and are trying to navigate their way out.

“Raven, take him,” Clarke says, nodding over to the injured man who has squeezed himself between Clarke and Bellamy. “His arm is busted so he can’t fight. We’ll cover you- do not go east,” she adds.

Raven doesn’t hesitate to follow the order, knowing full well this is not the time to argue with whatever plan Clarke is improvising. She shuffles to support the still anonymous stranger.

“Octavia go with her,” Bellamy tells his sister, pushing her forward slightly so that he is the closest to the opening of the staircase.

“I’m not leaving you!” she shrugs his arm off.

Clarke knows they don’t have time for this, and Octavia definitely isn’t leaving without her brother, so she reaches and points for the two of them to follow Raven.

“Both of you go. I’ll hold them off,”

She’d already decided what she were to do last night if they were to land in this position, and Bellamy reads it in her expression just as well as he had yesterday.

“Clarke,” he warns, his voice deadly low.

“I’m right behind you,” she lies.

Octavia takes his hand and they both start to run. Clarke turns on her heels, catching sight of the first few walkers rearing their heads. The leaders would only have to climb a dozen stairs to get to where she is now so she doesn’t hesitate before she starts shooting, taking down the first wave within seconds.

She accepts the head start willingly, looking only to see the fleeting silhouettes of the siblings down the corridor.

She takes after them and almost catches up when they reach the foot of another staircase, churning up more walkers like a production line.

Being at the back, she doesn’t really have a choice, so she stops and plants her feet, taking aim and shooting the first three in seconds.

The others don’t notice that she’s had to fall behind until they’re spaced at least twenty feet apart and she hears Octavia holler back for her.

“I’ll catch up!” she shouts back, not pausing in her defense.

“Clarke!” Raven practically growls then calls for her to duck.

So, without questioning the command, Clarke drops low and waits for Raven to cover her as she shuffles back. The gunfire ricochets throughout the narrow corridor as the oncoming horde begin to deplete some more.

Clarke takes it as her opportunity to close the gap between them all but then she notices, from the corner of her eye, the opening to the mess hall that they’d passed on their way in steadily filling up with the barreling of dead bodies, lurching forward desperately.

And then she’s cut off from the other’s, just like that. And the spaces between her and the flanks on either side are rapidly closing.

She doesn’t expect to hear it- not with the mix of the blood thumping in her ears and the oncoming lip smacks and moaning- but Bellamy’s shout booms and bounces between the halls so loudly that she practically reaches out for him.

“Princess!” He yells, like his voice is breaking.

Clarke lets out a sob, because maybe this is it.

Maybe she won’t make it out of this and maybe Wells will always be waiting for the day she comes home but Bellamy’s voice hits her deep and she needs to get back to them.

“Bell!” She shouts back, finally relenting to the fear. “Get out!”

She starts to lose sight of Raven’s ponytail.

“Fight Clarke! For fuck sake, fight!”

So she does.

She kicks and she pushes and she shoots.

It’s not enough but the push back opens up a small glimmer of a side corridor which she scrambles for instantly, trying to map out the different exits that they’d come across

She sprints like she’s never sprinted before, her feet pounding against the ground painfully. She turns corners, and steers around the pivots along the building that has suddenly turned into some kind of labyrinth.

Something catches her foot and her face slams to the floor.

She hits her head hard enough to see stars, her vision going blank until she hears the distorted begging of an old woman crawling over her manically.

She’s pleading for help, yelling into Clarke’s face and spitting blood from the side of her head that is missing a large chunk of flesh.

There’s a seeping yellow rim to the wound, and it’s deep enough for Clarke to see the stark white of her skull.

It’s too late for her.

Clarke brushes the stars away with a swift knee to the woman’s stomach, kicking her away and driving an arrow into the gash so that it goes through diagonally to her eye. It doesn’t kill her outright, but it blinds her enough for Clarke to get away.

She runs for what feels like hours, looking for any sign of a way out.

She starts to climb a flight of stairs on the complete other side of the building and glances back flippantly only to see a large figure with a huge pack on his shoulders, wearing a mop of curls that are breaking free of their military cut and drenched in sweat

“Clarke!” He yells not bothering to keep his voice down.

“Bellamy!” She stumbles forward towards him.

He jogs to a halt but when they collide, he still hits her with all of the momentum of a sprint, throwing his arms around her shoulders in some sort of survival bear hug.

She doesn’t think before she returns it, clinging on to him like her life depends on it.

He breathes a sigh of relief into her hair to which she returns, panting heavy.

He’s squeezing her so tight that she can’t breathe, and the embrace only lasts a few heartbeats.

It’s over before she knows it, but Clarke takes note of how well her head fit to rest on his broad shoulder, and how good his hair smells when it’s been soaked with his own sweat.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He asks, suddenly angry when they separate.

“I- I wasn’t- I didn’t mean,” she tries but she doesn’t have enough air in her lungs to explain why she fell behind.

“You’re okay, Clarke,”

He rests his hands on her arms and rubs her shoulders like they have all the time in the world.

“I’ve found you, you’re okay,”

She closes her eyes and relishes in his words before her eyes flash open and she realizes where they are: on the other side of the building, as far away from where they came in through as you can really get.

“You fucking idiot! We had a deal!” she says angrily, knowing full well that he should be nowhere near her. “No going back.”

He rolls his eyes, humorlessly.

“We also agreed we wouldn’t play the martyr,” he argues.

And what he says must make him realize how pissed off he is at her recklessness back there, because he steps back and his face hardens. “We don’t have time for this now. We need to get out of here,”

She catches his hand and pulls him back to her.

“They’re safe though, right?” she asks, pleading. He can be mad at her all he wants _after_ this. “The others?”

He nods gruffly and grimaces, giving her a once over.

“I told them we’d meet them in the tree line,”

She takes her hand back and they stride through the corridor in search for another way out.

“You should have left me,” she sighs but he doesn’t say anything.

It’s another close call when they run into a bumbling man in his forties, growling under his breath and taking on a cold snarl when he starts to smell the fresh blood pumping through their veins.

Clarke shoots him down with her last arrow, parting with it as she embraces a whole new feeling of being completely and uncontrollably helpless.

But she doesn’t need to worry like she would in any other scenario, because Bellamy has her back.

It takes them close to another fifteen minutes to find an exit, but stepping out into the brisk night air, with the wind howling venomously, feels like diving into a hot shower. And when they reach the outskirts of the base, Clarke clings onto the crisscross wiring of the fence and drops her forehead to it, unbelievably relieved that they actually made it out.

Bellamy still hasn’t spoken to her since they found each other, but she doesn’t know what she’d say even if he did.

They find the three of them once they’ve climbed through the same way they came in.

Raven is pacing the edge of the tree line, back and forth anxiously. Octavia and the stranger are sat slumped against the nearest tree, facing opposite directions both looking like they’re so exhausted they’re about to pass out.

Raven spots them first, launching herself over to Clarke, fisting her hair to bring their heads closer to each other.

Clarke cradles her back and they sway clumsily together. Both alive, and both together like it needs to be.

She notices Bellamy embracing Octavia from the corner of her eye, desperately, practically mirroring the way he’d held Clarke earlier.

Once they’ve all gotten over the relief of being reunited, Clarke moves over to the stranger and crouches down in front of him.

Bellamy, Octavia and Raven regroup and stand to the side, pointing out different directions that they should go in.

Bellamy is pointedly avoiding Clarke’s gaze, and she’s reminded of how his eyes had glazed over, cold and hard, after he’d made it clear she’d broken their rule.

At least Octavia is meeting her eyes, although every time she glances over, she’s wearing a sad smile- almost a grimace.

She turns back to the stranger and takes him in.

His eyes are rolling to the back of his head, which has fallen limp against the tree trunk.

His arm is being cradled by his other hand but if anything, it looks even worse than it did in the shadowed bathroom.

He probably hasn’t had anything to drink in days, let alone something to eat.

He’s wearing a hoodie that was probably grey before, but the front of it is soaked in vomit so it’s turned a musky green. The purple surrounding his eyes makes him look like he’s been punched on either side of the head.

So it’s no surprise that he’s barely conscious now.

“Hey,” she whispers, shaking his shoulder- the good one. “We’re out of there,”

He doesn’t stir.

“You’re going to have to stay awake for just a while longer- I need to check your arm,”

Still nothing.

“It’d help if I knew your name,” she mutters, more to herself now that she knows he’s not going to respond.

She looks back over to the others, suddenly feeling more alone than she has in days.

Something settles in the air, some sort of fucked up tension because they’re all shifting sullenly whenever she tries to look over.

And they’re discussing the next plan of action without even trying to see what she thinks.

This can’t be because she fell behind. Surely they knew that someone would have to risk themselves in there. Surely that was an inevitability? And it’s not like she died or anything.

Clarke jumps when the man under her hand shuffles briefly and starts to mumble despite being more dead than alive.

“You can’t… I’m…”

“That’s it,” Clarke softens, retreating back to what feels like decades ago when she’d comfort patients in the hospital ward. “You’re what?”

“Murphy,” he heaves, his chest rising unnaturally.

“Murphy,” Clarke nods. “Can you tell me anything else?”

He smirks and shakes his head, neck falling completely slack.

Clarke takes her pack off of her shoulders and retrieves her canteen from it, pouring the last few drops of water on to his lips in an attempt to give him any kind of sustenance.

Once it’s empty, she shoves it away and jogs over to the others.

“I got a name,” she tells them.

No-one says anything.

Bellamy looks to Raven pointedly ignoring Clarke.

“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s just get a move on before those things figure out how to work a door,”

Clarke tries again.

“Murphy can’t climb the cars in the state he’s in,” she says briskly.

Raven looks to her, and there’s a sadness in her eyes that makes Clarke want to melt.

“We’re going to stick to the tree line,”

Bellamy shoves past her when they start to make a move and Octavia hurries to join him, shooting Clarke an apologetic shrug when she turns back.

Clarke picks Murphy up as much as she can, and despite being half asleep he manages to stumble along just enough.

Not taking the highway will add a lot more travelling time on to their journey but there isn’t really another option.

They walk for hours into the sunrise trying to put as much distance between them and the base as possible.

Having ignored her all night, Bellamy is still wearing his stony gaze when Raven calls time on their walk.

Octavia looks like she doesn’t know what to do with herself, torn between the two of them but Clarke knows there aren’t really any sides.

Maybe she should be feeling guilty for putting herself on the line once more.

It’s just hard to accept the blame for something she knows she has so little control over. And to be completely fair, he broke the rules just as much as she did because he came back for her.

Raven makes it clear she isn’t happy with Clarke but she’s too diplomatic for her own good. That’s something they’ve both always been good at; using their heads before they even think about their hearts.

Unfortunately, Clarke seems to have lost all control over both.

Despite the awkwardness that has settled over them, Raven still tries her best to keep things cordial.

When they stop, after tucking themselves deeper into the forest for some added cover, Clarke finds that she can’t even bring herself to care about the fact that Bellamy is doing whatever he can to ignore her, because after all of that, they still found someone.

And it doesn’t matter that he’s only half breathing or that he has so far refused to even part with his full name- they saved _someone_.

But she also finds that she’s become a bit of a master at lying to herself. And the sight of a hurt Bellamy is one she can’t quite stand to be around.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'With the wild wolves around you,'  
> \- The Wolves, Bon Iver


	6. I won't let you choke on the noose around your neck

Octavia takes watch tonight. There’s no dispute about it.

Clarke sets Murphy down by a tree and leaves him to rest for the night.

She takes the other side of the same trunk, scared to leave him alone. But selfishly, Clarke appreciates having at least someone by her while the others are so blatantly cold.

It doesn’t take long for sleep to hit, but it’s not a peaceful one. She wakes up with the familiar cold sweat lining her neck and this time, Bellamy isn’t there to wipe it away. He’s passed out on the other side of a huge pile of logs that Octavia must have gathered during her watch.

She wants to smile about the upheaval of one of her magpie memories; the brunette hasn’t been able to sit still for more than twenty minutes since the day they met.

The sun is just beginning to rear its head so there wouldn’t be any point in going back to sleep even if she wanted to.

She pulls herself up and over to the sound of a running stream, not hesitating when she takes off her vest and slacks to dive in.

She cleans her hair three times over, only emerging when she can be sure that all of the blood has been removed by the current.

By the time she steps out, everyone is up and moving around. Clarke has always been comfortable in any kind of silence, but right now she can think of nothing worse than the noise of the breeze tickling her ears.

She needs to talk to _someone,_ but no one is quite meeting her eyes.

Fed up with the passive aggressive silence, Clarke takes herself over to the man slumped against her tree, still fast asleep.

She doesn’t move to wake him until she’s taken out a small, tattered bandage from the depths of her bag. It’s the only one she has and wanted to save it for an emergency, but Murphy’s arm has turned almost purple. She can see the lump of where the bone is jutting out unnaturally through the still soaking wet layer of fleece.

Clarke crouches down awkwardly in front of him and jostles his good shoulder lightly. He wakes up the same way he did last night, shooting his head around for a few moments in a panic.

His gaze settles on Clarke and he settles, if only slightly. And then his expression takes on that same snark, almost animalistic.

“So, you didn’t kill me in my sleep?”

Clarke snorts.

“We didn’t go to all that trouble just to turn you into mincemeat,”

“And there was me thinking I was gonna be used as a cult sacrifice. So much for the easy way out,”

She’s about to make another comment but he starts to eye something over her shoulder. Acting purely on instinct, Clarke reaches for her bow and fumbles when she realizes that she’s completely out of arrows.

She turns, hoping she might be able to hold her own, hand-to-hand, until one of the others notice, but she only sees Raven.

“She got you out,” Clarke supplies, noticing him watching the brunette suspiciously.

“I don’t remember,”

She nods, but doesn’t say much more until she’s created a sling out of the small strip of bandage and has set his arm as best she can.

 

…

 

The fire is roaring by lunch. It’s an unspoken agreement that they’re taking at least today to rest, and considering how drained everyone is, Clarke doesn’t doubt that they’ll be here tomorrow too.

She manages to get Murphy to his feet when the rain starts again, because his immune system is already fucked. If he doesn’t stay warm then he’s only going to get worse.

Raven deals out the clothes that they managed to get from the stores. There are three thick fleeces, four thinner ones, four waterproof jackets, endless pairs of socks and a couple other odd bits.

The two of them had shoved as much as they could on to themselves last night, but Clarke hadn’t noticed because it was dark.

Murphy is only wearing a thin fleece layer so Clarke doesn’t hesitate to shove a thicker one over his shoulders and covers his legs in her old waterproof before she drapes a new one over his head.

He doesn’t say anything while she mothers him, but he does look slightly sheepish when they start eating the fish that Raven managed to catch.

He shuffles towards her, away from everyone else, probably noticing the ice thick tension.

And when everyone has finished eating, having scampered away, he pulls something out from his pocket.

“It’s waterlogged and I haven’t been able to get a signal since the infection,” he shrugs, passing her a tiny radio the shape of a walkie-talkie.

Clarke gasps when he drops it into her hand.

“Maybe you’ll have more luck,”

She shakes her head, still in awe at the bounty in her fingers.

“Raven’s the one to go to for that sort of thing. She fixes cars for fun,”

He looks over to her friend, who is eyeing them cautiously, clearly having heard the conversation.

Raven walks over to them, eyes flashing when she sees the gift.

“I can take a look, but I’d say there’s no hope for that thing,” she says, reaching for the radio.

Murphy intercepts it on its way between them and snatches it from the air. He looks guilty when Raven flinches, but he shrugs his shoulders casually.

“I don’t want you to have it,”

Raven doesn’t say anything; she sighs and stalks away, not without glancing sadly at Clarke once more.

He hands it back to Clarke, who takes it, uncertain now. But he’s pretty insistent and Clarke is curious.

She reaches for the dial on it and twists it until white noise erupts from the speaker.

“I spent days searching for a signal,” Murphy sighs. “There isn’t a frequency that works,”

Clarke isn’t ready to give up, so she puts it into the pocket of her new fleece, so that it reaches the driest part of her.

“Where are you guys heading?” he asks, poking the fire.

“Vancouver,” she answers. “There should be another safehouse there,”

He makes a sound, like a grunt, and Clarke can tell that he thinks they’re living in fantasy land. Because he’s seen how easily the safehouses can be infected.

“We’ve got family there,”

His face drops a bit, losing the snark in his eyes.

“Yeah,” she nods.

Her gaze flits up to Bellamy, who she’s been trying not to look at all day because she doesn’t want to read what’s in his eyes.

He’s watching her curiously, from where he’s leaning on a tree and carving into something: the same bit of wood that he’d been shaping days ago under the bus shelter.

His face is a storm, coldness raging across his complexion. She wants to reach up to his eyebrows and stroke the creases out.

“Well,” Murphy says, tossing a twig into the fire. “I’ve got nowhere else to go,”

He’s saying it like it’s obvious.

“You look like you could use another pair of hands. Well, hand,”

He waves his only good arm at her, lifting one side of his mouth and he’s trying to make light, so she plays along.

Clarke notices how he’s not talking about the others, he’s barely acknowledged them all day. So, when he offers his company, Clarke can tell he’s talking to her, and only her. Maybe he’s just pitying her because of how much the others are ignoring her.

“Well, as much as you loved the idea of becoming a religious sacrifice, I’m not leaving you to fend for yourself. Especially not with that,” she smirks, prodding the sling so he flinches.

He drops his head. Enough said.

She grabs her bag and rests it behind him.

“Get some sleep,” she tells him.

The sun is still high in the sky and it’s still raining but he probably hasn’t had a real sleep in days and the blue under his eyes is only getting deeper.

“I still don’t know your name,” he mumbles through heavy eyes and a yawn.

“You didn’t hear it?”

“I don’t remember much,” he sounds vaguely innocent for just a moment.

“What do you remember?”

Clarke is hoping he’ll tell her something more, maybe from the days before they found him, but if he can’t tell her that yet then she understands. This has to come with time.

“Princess?” he mutters unsure, as though recalling a distant memory. “I remember hearing princess?”

Murphy’s neck swivels to look over at Bellamy, his mind clearly wondering.

“He lost you,” he carries on, piecing together a story that has deep chunks missing out of it.

Guilt floods through her once more, and Clarke has to swallow deeply, clearing her throat before she can answer.

“My name is Clarke,”

She tries to steady her voice but it doesn’t work.

“Like Superman?”

She snorts, and for the first time she can’t muster a witty response so she stalks back over to the river, leaving him to rest, and settles on a rock before she brings the radio back out of her pocket.

 

…

 

It’s a hot night but the iciness of the river shows blatantly that November is coming. The clock is running fast.

Clarke has got her feet submerged, perched on top of a smooth stone slab with her back to the others who are setting up to cook some dry beans.

The sun is setting, sinking rapidly into the trees and stars are already beginning to expose themselves, crystal clear tonight.

She can feel the heated looks that are being thrown around silently behind her, but Clarke doesn’t turn to face them. If they need her for anything then they’ll just call her over.

She doubts they will, though.

She has the radio in her hands, twisting the dial round and round to listen out for something other than white noise but she hasn’t gotten lucky over the past few hours and she doesn’t think she will anytime soon.

She can picture the music that used to come out of it, old school rock or something like that. One of the songs her father used to play on their car radio while she would complain about how overrated it was.

She’s worried about Bellamy now.

The others will find their own ways to get over what she did, and naively Clarke knows that they all came out of it just fine. She can hear his heavy footsteps from over here so he’s clearly still sulking and she’s not going to bother approaching him until he can get over himself.

For now, she can just pretend she’s on the lookout.

There is a hole in her boots, beneath all the rough bite-sized scrapes and Clarke doesn’t know how to repair them but she’s guessing it won’t be too big a deal for the mean time.

“Clarke,” Octavia calls out after about an hour. She sounds very tired- not angry or bitter just tired. Enough to remind Clarke of how tired she is herself, but she doesn’t look over her shoulder, just sets the radio down in preparation.

“Yeah?”

There’s a pause, some muffled voices and then a grunt, one that someone might make after being punched in the stomach.

“You want to come and help with the fire?”

It’s an olive branch if she’s ever seen one, and Clarke appreciates the attempt, but she can practically feel the scold that Bellamy is sending her way.

“I’m good, O, you look like you’ve got it sorted,”

She hasn’t turned around. They get the message.

 

…

 

Clarke likes to think that she’s strong. She’s always been independent despite her privileged upbringing and with that self-reliance came a strength she could be proud of.

She wouldn’t have lasted as long as she has if she were weak. That’s not how this works.

But isolating herself, like she’s doing now, is not strong. She doesn’t deserve self-pity, not when she let her companions down. And it takes the presence of a younger brunette with cheekbones sharp enough to cut yourself on, for Clarke to realize that.

Octavia slumps down on to the rock next to her after another hour; the sun has disappeared now, but the fire is roaring from somewhere behind them.

She doesn’t say anything.

She’s brought with her two large weights that Clarke feels lean against her back awkwardly.

She turns to see what she’s being given, and her gaze lands on the two quivers of arrows that O had packed away last night.

It’s a sign of forgiveness. She had all day to give them to Clarke, and she’s choosing only now to do it.

Something settles in the air between them, a familiarity that Clarke welcomes warmly.

She reaches for one of the arrows and spins it around her fingers to test it out. It feels perfect, and the aluminum stripe dances, reflecting light that comes from nowhere and everywhere all at once.

She clings to it tightly as she lifts both leather straps over her shoulder so that they rest against her chest, rising in time with her heart.

“Thank you,” she nods, unable to put into words how grateful she really is.

Octavia’s eyes are still made of warm ice, frozen silk in the darkness.

Clarke can tell that she’s going to say whatever she’s going to say and then it’ll be okay. Octavia doesn’t have a habit of overcomplicating things.

“You almost got him killed, Clarke,” she says lowly to the river.

“I know,” Clarke nods, guilt surging through her like it’s another hit.

“You almost got yourself killed too,”

There isn’t much to say to that. She knows how close to death she’d become.

“Yeah,” she chokes out.

There’s a gust of wind, carrying silence with it.

“I won’t lose him. I can’t,”

Her voice breaks- it’s the most emotional she’s sounded since she found out about Isaac.

Clarke nods as she clears her throat, swallowing the lump that is steadily rising. Then she feels a heavy boot nudge her leg, catching one of the bruises that lines her thigh.

It’s playful. It’s a warmth.

“Or anyone _else_ I care about,”

“I won’t let that happen,”

Octavia rolls her eyes.

“That includes you too,”

 _You won’t lose me,_ Clarke wants to say. But that’d be a lie, and a promise she can’t afford to make anymore.

Instead she nods gently and when the girl reaches for her shoulders, Clarke returns the hug, burrowing her fingers into her shoulder blades so that Octavia will know how alive she is. That she’s here.

“Now quit sulking and come and sit with us. You didn’t save all of our asses just to come out here and mope,” the brunette says, beaming once more as though nothing has happened.

But just because she’s forgiven her, that doesn’t mean Raven and Bellamy have. And Clarke has a feeling those conversations are going to be a lot harder to manage.

She looks over to Bellamy, who is staring at the fire like he’s reading it, learning each flame before it disappears.

“He’s angry,” Clarke shrugs.

“Of course he’s angry,” O says back, and Clarke doesn’t know what she expected to hear.

“He didn’t have to come back for me,” she argues, feeling the need to get it out there. “I didn’t want him to risk his life.”

Octavia observes her for a minute, eyes flitting across her face curiously.

“You think that’s why he’s mad?”

She shrugs. How is she meant to know when he won’t even look at her?

“Talk to him, Clarke. And do it sooner rather than later,” she says as she stands to leave. “Bellamy’s sulking is even worse than yours,”

Octavia walks away, with more of a skip in her step than she’s had all day. And she’s strong, so immensely fierce because she’s happy. Her smiles aren’t flippant. Clarke respects that.

She wants to be like that. To be happy with whatever life she’s given.

And she wants her friends back.

She stays playing with the radio again, her fingers tracing all the little notches that reveal its age. She wonders if it was his before the infection, or if he got it at the base.

Mind spinning, her thoughts trail to Bellamy once more and she starts planning what she’s going to say to him. How she’s going to trade her apologies for his forgiveness, without both of them losing their heads.

When someone sits down next to her, taking Octavia’s spot, Clarke doesn’t have to guess at who it is.

His heavy breathing is jagged enough, and she’s heard it near her ears enough times for her to know.

She doesn’t say anything to him, guessing that he’ll want to take the lead and get what he needs to say out before he bursts.

She’s playing with her arrows now and has counted them eight times over by the time he nudges her arm.

It’s the first contact they’ve made all day.

Clarke cherishes it.

He’s holding out a half empty can filled with purple beans.

“Eat,” he says simply, not giving anything away.

She doesn’t meet his eyes.

“I’m not hungry,”

“Eat,” he tries again, pushing the can into her arm more forcefully.

She takes it out of his hands, cradling it with her own and slowly starts to pick at the beans with her fingers.

He reaches in and grabs one, throwing it into the air and catching it in his mouth.

“How many?” he asks, nodding to the arrows over her back.

“Fifty-six,”

He makes a sound, like a laugh that comes out of his nose as a rush of air.

“Jackpot,”

“Yeah,” she shrugs, not sure where this is going.

But he’s playing the long haul and he has no intention of breaching the subject. Coming over to her is as much of an open palm as he’s going to give her. Now it’s time for Clarke to give him hers.

“Bellamy, I know you’re mad but I didn’t-“

“Don’t you dare,” he cuts her off. His voice breaks and she reels.

“What?” she asks, hating how vulnerable she sounds.

“Don’t dare,” he’s pleading now. “Don’t you dare make out like I’m overreacting,”

“I wasn’t going to,” Clarke promises.

He says nothing.

“I am sorry. I didn’t want you to have to risk your life for me…”

His face is still hard as stone.

“I didn’t think you would,”

“Why not?” his head shoots up and they meet eyes for the first time. It’s electric.

Clarke shrugs to him, unable to explain herself.

“You can’t honestly think that’s why I’m mad?” He asks, running his hand through his hair and pulling at it, repeating his famous Bellamy tick.

Again, she shrugs. She probably looks like an idiot with her shoulders bobbing up and down as though she can’t comprehend basic English.

“You’re ridiculous,”

“I know,” she starts, finally landing on something she can agree with. She’d like him to elaborate though. “Care to spell it out for me?”

“I’m _mad_ because I can’t keep up with your suicide mission,” he relents, his face lights up like an oil painting with all the emotions he’s been trying to suppress now erupting.

Clarke can’t ignore the hurt in his veiled wince. “It’s like you’re trying to get yourself killed. I just don’t get why,”

“I’m not,”

And it’s true. She’s not.

He just scoffs and flashes his eyebrows, a challenge.

“Bellamy, I’m not. I just understand that sometimes sacrifices need to be made-”

“No Clarke. You don’t,”

It’s the third time he’s cut her off and she understands that he’s angry, okay, she gets it. But if he won’t even let her finish her sentences then-

“What do you want from me Bellamy?” she asks, raising her voice to drown out the shakiness.

“I want you to realize how reckless that was!” he matches her slightly unsteady pitch and she notices his fingers turn white as they clench the rock by his sides.

“Fine,” she yields. “It was reckless. But I can’t control what I do in the heat of the moment,”

“Yes, you can,” he exasperates.

“It’s instinct, Bellamy,”

“Fuck instinct. You have no value for your own life. You’d rather die than see Raven get so much as a paper cut,”

She rolls her eyes, deadpan.

“Don’t be such a drama queen,”

He nods, mockingly understanding.

“So, you want me to just let you run your martyr complex until it kills you?”

“If it takes me dying to get the people that I care about through this then I’ve accepted that,”

If he falters at her inadvertently admitting that she cares about him, he doesn’t show it.

“Have you always been this ignorant?”

“What?” she falters.

He sighs before he elaborates.

“You’ve got to start thinking about what we need as well,” he says slowly. “Losing you… that’d kill Raven. She doesn’t let you see it, but she refuses to be any more than five feet away from you when you’re sleeping.

She was getting ready to shoot me when she thought you’d died the other day. It’s selfish to think that you’re the only person who needs to see someone survive,”

Everything he says rings true, too true for her to admit that he’s right.

“You know what, I’m done apologizing for keeping you alive. And you are hardly one to talk- I’ve seen how reckless you become when Octavia is in danger! That’s what Raven is to me,” she says as though he hasn’t realized that yet. “She’s my sister in every way but blood.”

“Then don’t let her lose you,” he snaps. “Fight for your fucking life, Clarke,”

“I’m trying!” she all but cries, her voice raw.

“Well try harder!” He pleads back, his own voice booming through the surrounding trees.

It’s a reality check if she’s ever felt one. Maybe it’s just the caramel in his eyes, melting with all the intensity that he hasn’t let her see, but Clarke is done arguing. And he’s so right.

“Okay,” she breathes, looking out to the abyss of the river.

“Okay?” he sounds uncertain. He’s probably surprised that she didn’t put up more of a fight.

“I’m sorry. Really, I am. And thank you Bellamy,”

She reaches for his shoulder, thumb caressing the tension out of his posture.

“For keeping me alive,”

He looks to her hand, how it fits so naturally to his frame, and he smiles softly.

“Yeah, well I thought it was about time that I returned the favor,” he smirks before he swings his arm around her shoulders, pulling her into him like he has no allusion to personal space. She didn’t think he’d notice how her teeth had started to chatter.

She leans into him instinctively, breathing in the smell of his shirt.

“You’re worth a lot more to us alive than dead,”

She recognizes what she’d said to him before they entered the base and smiles into the thick cotton that she’s resting her face on.

“I was right though,” she mumbles, despite herself.

“About what?” he asks, humoring her.

“The safehouse. We got someone out,”

Her voice is reverent. He leans his cheek onto her head.

“Yeah well, we’ll see if that turns out to be worth it when the kid runs off with all our stuff in the middle of the night,”

“With a broken arm?” she snorts.

He hums, probably pondering his next retort but her fist clenches into his shirt and he goes silent.

“Bell?” she asks, her voice softer than she can remember.

“Yes, Princess?”

“Can you stay? Just for a bit?”

She doesn’t know why she asks, but she needs him tonight.

She’ll be strong again tomorrow and she’ll look after them once more. For now, she needs to feel his heartbeat in her ear and the stories of the stars.

The way he says her nickname has changed; she’s noticed that too. There is no snark anymore, none at all. Instead he says it fondly, like he’s referencing a marvel. She decides she doesn’t mind it.

He burrows his cheek further into her hair, and the imprint of his smile is forged into the grease and the dirt in her locks. He doesn’t seem to mind that either.

 

…

 

Bellamy tells her about Atlas tonight; the Titan forced to hold the weight of the celestial spheres for eternity.

“Octavia wanted a dog when we were little, more than anything else but we never got one. That’d have been it though,”

“What?”

“Atlas. I would have called it Atlas,”

“S’pretty,” she mumbles.

He chuckles lightly.

“Octavia didn’t seem to think so,”

“You’d think she’d be kind of an advocate of non-generic names,” Clarke muses, looking up to him with an arched brow.

“Nah,” he shrugs and grins mischievously. “I chose hers too,”

“Of course you did,” and she laughs loudly.

“Resented me for years because of it,”

Bellamy doesn’t look a bit guilty in the slightest. In fact, he looks smug if anything. She likes how the twist of his lips says everything.

“What about you?” He turns, “Any pets?”

“No, my mum wouldn’t let us- she said they were too messy. I had a bird for a while though that would come to my window every morning and bring me something.

Coins that he’d found on a beach, or a glass shard from a broken beer bottle. I think he was just using me as a storage unit but still…”

Clarke gets a bit carried away with the memory. She feels the heat rise to her neck, but Bellamy just stays watching her, listening intently like he’s hanging on to every word.

“What happened?” He questions, turning onto his stomach as he rests his chin on to his hand.

Clarke has wriggled down to lie on her back, and when he turns, he’s hovering over her.

He’s all she sees.

“I don’t know, he just stopped coming back after a while, so I stopped waiting. One for sorrow and all that,” she hums, and he smiles sadly down at her.

He doesn’t move, but his eyes glance up to the camp that they’ve made. They’d been so caught up in their conversation that Clarke had almost forgotten about where they are.

He seems to have too, if the way he guiltily bites his lip is anything to go by.

“He doesn’t know,” Bellamy mutters, his face dropping as his eyes catch something.

Clarke cranes her neck, but the camp looks upside down from where she’s laid, and she can’t quite trace his line of sight.

“Why we went to the safehouse. He thinks it was just to restock,”

He’s talking about Murphy.

Clarke feels a strange protective surge before she remembers who she’s talking to. She hasn’t seen him talk to Bellamy at all today and she wants to ask when they spoke but it’s quite easy to figure out that it was when she was sat where she is now.

“Let’s not tell him,” she asks softly. “He already thinks he’s enough of an inconvenience,”

Murphy might not have said it explicitly to her, but each time she tried to offer him some food, or one of the pieces that they’d managed to salvage from the safehouse, she could see the guilt in his eyes.

“Good,” Bellamy says gruffly, but Clarke can tell he doesn’t mean it.

 

…

 

Clarke wakes up when she feels something shift suddenly against her. Her back is pressed hard against the cold stone and there’s a weight next to her, resting on her arm.

She lifts herself up and looks down to Bellamy. They must have fallen asleep out here at some point in the night during their endless conversation; he’s got his hands folded across himself, trying to balance himself as he leans half off the rock.

He’s kind of cradling himself, and his face has contorted painfully. And he starts shaking his head, caught up in whatever he’s dreaming.

He’s suffering, whatever is happening, the wince on his face says it all and Clarke doesn’t think before she grabs his shoulder to shake him roughly.

He throws himself forward, almost headbutting her. Panting completely exhausted, he meets her eyes. The panic in them breaks her heart, blown wide with most of the color gone. She can see her own concern in them.

He’s breathing heavily, chest rising and falling like a ticking time bomb.

His hair has fallen into his eyes, tickling the scratches that line his face. There are traces of blood that look days old, having mixed with new streams.

There are colors melting across his face, like shades of paint on a palette.

She was always good at art as a kid, and maybe it’s the painter in her that feels the need to smooth the blood out, clear it away.

“Clarke?” He asks, his voice ruined.

He reaches for her shoulders unknowingly and digs his fingers in to her arms so hard she knows it’s going to leave bruises.

But he needs to know that he’s got someone. And Clarke is happy to do for him what he did for her days ago.

“I’m here, Bellamy,” she whispers, lifting her fingers to push the hair back from his forehead, no matter how sticky it is with sweat.

Her hand goes to his neck, and she pulls him to her.

He holds on to her tightly, wrapping her in a desperate embrace. Even if it’s just because he needs to feel _something_ other than fear, Clarke doesn’t mind.

She returns the hug, needing him to be okay.

He smells so warm, so much like some abstract thought of home. She breathes it in, committing the scent to memory.

She coos in his ear, whispering promises she’ll never be able to keep about how he’s okay, how he’s going to be just fine, how they’re all safe thanks to him.

And with each one, his needy hold on her seems to loosen infinitesimally, until they are just sat, perched on a rock shrouded in starlight cradling each other.

Not because they need it but because it’s more natural than anything else.

He knows how to hold a girl.

Which should have been obvious, considering how much he looks like a Calvin Klein model.

Clarke wonders if his hands would fit as comfortably to anyone else’s back or if his fingers were made just for the unique divots in her spine. Like an anatomical jigsaw.

He pulls away when they start to fade again, comforted by each other’s breaths; so at ease that sleep finds them in plain sight.

He gives her one last squeeze, a thank you, as though he wouldn’t be the one to do this for anyone who needed the help.

Then he stands, wobbling only a bit and pulls her to her feet with him.

Wandering from the track that he’s planned only slightly, they make it back over to the campfire, shrouded in silence.

He goes straight to his sister, who’s crashed against both his and her packs, cradled by them both, and it sinks in for Clarke what his dream must have been about. Who it is always about for him.

It’s an irregular kind of love that Bellamy has for his sister; it’s like they share a pair of lungs. If she stops breathing, so will he, and vice versa. She wants to know why, and she makes sure to ask him the next time they have the kind of conversation that they’ve had tonight.

Open and without barriers.

Clarke’s glad he didn’t get too deep with the questions he asked her, because she knows she would have told him anything in the moment.

Murphy is on the other side of the camp, drooling into Clarke’s bag, a half-eaten protein bar fallen limp in his hand.

That was Raven’s last one, she notes.

The girl herself is sat at the fire, glaring into it.

Clarke sidles up to her wordlessly, dropping a log into the flames to announce her presence.

Raven grunts in response, at least she’s acknowledging her.

“You two looked pretty cozy,” she comments, nodding her head over to the vacated rock.

“Raven…” Clarke starts, unable to find a place to begin her apology.

“I get it, Clarke, I do,”

She shuts up, listening to what the brunette has to say. She knew Raven would take the lead in this, and she’ll say what she needs to say.

“When my parents got into the crash, everyone told me not to tell him straight away. They said it’d only make things worse until they’d stabilized some kind of income and all the admin stuff was sorted.

So, I made him a bowl of popcorn, and let him curl up while we marathoned practically every Marvel movie.”

Raven pauses, her voice breaking on the memory and Clarke reaches for her leg, gripping it to provide some balance.

“Shooting himself was the right thing to do. It was his only way out and with time, I’ve come to accept that.

But killing yourself is not the only way out of this. You’re a fighter, Clarke. You always have been.

Please don’t let the sacrifices they’ve made be for nothing,”

She’s not just talking about her brother, but she’s referring to everybody that they’ve lost from their hometown, including Clarke’s mother who she’d never really been close to. That doesn’t make the memory of her hurt any less.

And it’s the final nail in the coffin of whatever game Clarke has been playing. She can’t be selfish like this anymore, and she needs to stop risking her own life just because she thinks she knows best.

Because it’s hurting the only people that she really, truly has left and every single wall that exists between them only makes things worse.

“Okay,” she whispers, sound barely coming out.

Raven drops her head on to Clarke’s shoulder, like a flower that has had to stand tall all day finally being allowed to wilt. And she falls asleep peacefully, leaving Clarke to ponder how she’s going to go about making sure she doesn’t hurt any of them again.

 

…

 

“Bellamy, stop playing with your new toy and come get your ass over here!”

He’d found a new gun at the base, somewhere in the depths of the basement store. He’s standing fifty feet away from camp, aiming his new assault rifle into the trees. Twisting and turning each part with ease.

He seems more comfortable with this gun- Clarke guesses that’s because of his military training- and it fits to Bellamy like it was built just for him.

He sighs, drooping the gun to his side, and trudges over. He sits down by his sister across the fire, swinging an arm around her easily.

“We’re talking game plan,” Raven carries on, picking her way through another tin of beans.

Murphy is sat on Clarke’s side, closer to her than anyone else. He shifts uncomfortably next to her, probably uncertain about being suddenly thrown in to the ‘team’.

“Talk me through it,” Bellamy says as though they would have started discussing it without him.

“No, I meant we should talk game plan,”

“Okay,” he shrugs. “What are the options?”

“We’ve become clumsy,” Clarke says lightly. “And we’ve been taking too many risks. We need to stay away from the cities,”

“Agreed,” Raven nods.

“Once we hit December, we’re not going to be able to go as fast as we’ve been going,” Bellamy adds on, his brow furrowed in contemplation.

“So we need to cover as much ground as we can,”

“You think we should cut across Wyoming?” Octavia asks.

“I came from North Dakota,” Murphy says, clearing his throat awkwardly. “Going there would be a death wish. It’s a mutiny,”

He looks like he expects some backlash from chipping in, but no one really reacts. Raven nods her head, looking like her mind is made.

“Wyoming it is,”

Murphy looks to Clarke anxiously, and she responds by nodding her head. He’s with them now. He’s going to be part of the group whether he likes it or not.

“We should leave in a few hours, so we can give ourselves some time to get our shit together,”

“If we’re heading north-east then we’ll have to leave the river behind,”

The realization sucks because the days where they don’t have water are always the worst. Gross breath, grimy skin and rationed drinking water all add up to the day feeling like it’s lasted the week.

“We’ll carry as much as we can,” Bellamy says, still thinking out loud. “Clarke, come and give me a hand?”

They round up all the canteens they have combined and take them to the river to refill. There isn’t much chatting, but the comments that they do share make Clarke lighten each time she laughs.

It’s companionable silence, with droplets of banter that fog her memories, creating an illusion of the old days.

And then they all set off, Bellamy with his new gun steady in his hands, and Clarke with her fully loaded sheath of arrows, the other tucked snuggly into her bag. Octavia has her favorite pistol forever by her side, but now she’s got countless bullets that act as backup. They haven’t armed Murphy because his good hand is out of use so there wouldn’t be much point anyway.

Clarke’s given him a small knife to use for emergencies.

Raven didn’t manage to find any bullets for her rifle, so she’s had to replace it with a smaller assault rifle like Bellamy’s. It’s not ideal, because Raven’s specialty has always been her hunting gun, but the rifle is probably more suitable for the situations that they’re due to encounter.

And she’s never been picky.

The route they’re aiming to take allows them to tread their way through the forest floor, but it still takes them away from the river. Today feels dry as a bone, so they can’t hope for rain either.

Clarke just hopes they can cover as much ground in the next couple of days as they can, before the temperature really starts to drop.

Bellamy falls into step beside Clarke, who is currently leading the way, and he mumbles something incoherent about being a good navigator. She doesn’t let him see her smile.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'I won't let you choke, on the noose around your neck,'  
> \- The Cave, Mumford and Sons


	7. We lose our minds in a city of roses

“So, North Dakota?” Raven starts when she falls to walk beside Murphy. Clarke can hear the caution in her voice start to drift immediately.

“What about it?” He asks, short.

“You grew up there?”

Clarke guesses she’s trying to learn something, anything about him. He is, in effect, just a stranger at the end of the day.

Raven always had a way of making friends; she’s always so easy around people. Always makes them want more. Clarke wonders if Murphy will be different.

“Sure,” is all he replies.

“What was that like?”

“Oh, you know, skating on the frozen lakes until someone falls through. Hunting like there’s no tomorrow. Holding hands around a campfire while we sing about the good old days,”

His voice is all snark; the over-romanticized memories are clearly laced with bullshit. It makes Clarke snort noticeably.

“Sorry,” Raven says, apologetic.

“It’s cool, I never thought of it as home anyway,” he sounds like he’s getting more and more weary with the conversation.

“Why not?” the brunette tries, relentless.

“Fuck, do you always ask this many questions?”

“Can you blame me for trying to get to know the person who we’re letting tag along with us?”

Clarke doesn’t think that Raven meant for it to come out so aggressive, but it makes him reel.

“If I’m such a burden then I’ll be on my way. I’d hate to inconvenience you,”

“And you’d sure last long looking like that,”

They’re both angry now, still walking side by side but looking like they’d rather be anywhere else other than next to each other.

“You don’t know anything about me. And I managed just fine before your lot showed up,”

Clarke’s had enough. Is this what she and Bellamy sounded like? She makes a note to apologize to both Octavia and Raven later because this shit is insufferable.

“Break it up,” she snaps, dropping back to step between them. “We don’t need this.”

Bellamy turns his head to give her a nod, an affirmation that she’s making the right move.

“No, Clarke, if he reckons he doesn’t need us then let him go. Let the cockroach run away because he’s too noble to admit we saved his life,” Raven argues back, pulling back even more so that Murphy steps forward to walk beside Bellamy silently.

He must’ve struck a nerve, because Raven is fuming.

“Raven we don’t know what he’s been through,” she tries.

“And I think that’s something that needs to change. What’s the point in keeping secrets now, Clarke?”

“Grilling him is not going to help him trust us. That’s not how it works, and you know that,”

“Well how does it work then, Clarke? Because you definitely weren’t like this when those two showed up,”

Raven’s not mad at her, she rarely ever is deep down. So Clarke doesn’t take it personally when she gestures strongly to Bellamy.

“He’s broken Raven, look at him,” Clarke says, staying calm but fighting all the same.

She doesn’t know why, but she feels oddly protective of the injured man.

Murphy spins around sharply, regaining the venomous snarl that Clarke has seen countless times in the last couple of days. 

“Just because you got me out of there does not mean I owe you my life story. It’s all I have left and I’m not going to give it up to the likes of you,” he snaps, looking to Raven with malice before he turns to Clarke and steps towards her. “And I’m not _broken_. I’m not a kicked puppy that you need to fix-”

He practically spits the words at her- more emotion than he’s displayed since they found him. Clarke winces when he gets closer until he’s yanked away in the next second, cut off by Bellamy’s growl.

“Hey! Watch it,” he warns. Clarke is surprised to hear that tone in his voice again, after having grown sort of used to his softness with her, but he sounds menacing and steady. Scary almost.

He holds on to Murphy’s good arm, tugs him away from the girls, and shoves him forward to act as a buffer. He glances back to Clarke briefly, a question strong in his gaze.

 _Are you alright?_ He seems to ask with his eyes alone.

She nods her head; of course she is.

And then he’s stalking forward, grabbing Murphy by the collar of his jacket to take the lead.

Raven shoots Clarke a look. An ‘I’m not done with this,’ glare that is dusted in ‘We can agree to disagree,’.

So, Clarke takes her wrist in her fingers and they carry forward in silence, happy to bench the argument for later: after they’ve covered the ground that they need to.

Octavia breaks the tension happily, questioning Clarke on whether the year she spent trying to become vegan was worth it, and everything goes back to normal. Well, as normal as it can be.

 

…

 

They stop their hike three hours after sunset, all of them sufficiently exhausted from the intense climb through the forest floor.

Raven takes first watch, and Clarke doesn’t really take in much from the evening as she lets sleep consume her the moment she’s scouted their chosen camp and made sure Murphy’s arm is still set.

He refuses to say much, like he doesn’t trust what will come out if he opens his mouth.

She doesn’t care, she just wants to get some rest.

And she does until she’s shaken awake by Octavia in the early hours of the morning, who informs her that it’s her shift.

And that passes by uneventful. She wakes everyone up the moment the sun rises, and they’re off, traipsing through the woods once more.

They repeat the cycle for another week, marching through whichever way the trees take them with the sun as their only navigator, then crashing during nightfall.

It’s good, being this tired. It stops Clarke from having to think about the bigger picture. Because she misses Wells so goddamn much now. And she wants her family back by her side.

Bellamy saves them all once more during Clarke’s watch one night.

She isn’t quite sure what actually happens because one minute she’s sat against a tree, twirling an arrow in her fingers, and the next the (admittedly quieter) sound of Bellamy’s new gun rings through her ears, and a grey skinned woman falls to its knees a few yards away from her.

She looks to him, shocked, and he hasn’t taken his face away from the sight of the rifle. Aiming it to the side like he expects more to emerge within the next few seconds.

Clarke stands, loads her bow, taking only a moment to scold herself for letting them down before she makes sure to cover all the spots that Bellamy is having to glance away from.

It’s the first run-in they’ve had since Nebraska, so he hasn’t had much chance to use the gun, but Clarke sees the change in the way he shoots instantly.

It’s much more comfortable, way more natural, and she watches the way he holds himself with something similar to amazement.

She feels herself stutter out an apology, but he brushes it off.

She hadn’t seen him wake up- he had definitely been asleep only moments before- which only makes it more remarkable.

They wake everyone up together, telling them that they’re compromised if they stay here much longer.

Clarke tries to apologize a few more times, however he still won’t have it.

He just makes a joke about how he now expects her to teach him how to do the arrow trick and they’re cool.

 

…

 

Raven collapses eight days after Nebraska.

She’s leading the way through a pretty sparse area of woodland, so Clarke only sees the tips of her ponytail sway unsteadily before she crashes down to the ground, head hitting the edge of a mossy stone.

“Raven!” Clarke feels herself yell out when she runs forward.

She reaches the brunette, scattering her bow to the floor, and takes in the sight of her.

She’s unconscious, clearly. Her eyes are hooded over like they’re glued shut together.

Her skin looks flushed red, but there’s no sweat lining her forehead.

In fact, when Clarke reaches to touch her cheek, her skin feels bone dry. Her lips are chapped, flaking to pieces of dead skin like breadcrumbs.

“Octavia!” She calls, looking to whoever is approaching with concern.

O drops down on the other side of Raven, hands hovering over the body awkwardly as she frets about what to do.

“Shit! What happened?” she asks, meeting Clarke’s worried gaze.

The blonde reaches to pinch her on the arm- hard enough to wake her if she were simply sleeping.

“She’s not responding,”

She tries calling Raven’s name, shaking her only softly, and yet she gets nothing back.

“Raven, can you hear me?” Octavia asks, hand lifting to clench at her shoulder. “It’s O,”

Still no reply.

Looking at her now, Clarke can see the warning signs as they stick out like a sore thumb.

Her eyes seem to have sunken back into her head, like they’re scared. And every part of her feels way too dry to be normal.

“Come on, Rae. Wake up for us,” she whispers, smoothing the fly aways of her ponytail back away from her flaming forehead.

She feels someone land by her side, and Bellamy is already setting to work, trying to assess her as best he can to look for anything Clarke missed.

“Clarke?” Raven murmurs, her eyes still closed, limp. Her voice comes out hoarse.

Bellamy lifts her head delicately, but she doesn’t try to sit up. Her body looks completely exhausted, like she’s shut down.

He pulls his fingers away from her head and there are streaks of red lining them.

He’s staring at his hand in shock and Clarke lets hers take its place, looking underneath Raven’s head to see a small pool of blood soaked up by the moss.

She must’ve hit her head pretty hard.

One problem at a time:

“She’s dehydrated,” she says to them, then turns to the man beside her to ask for help.

He’s already moving though, taking his canteen out of his bag hurriedly and lifting Raven’s head once more.

He’s not perturbed by the scarlet damp patch this time, as he raises the bottle to Raven’s lips and pours carefully.

“There you go, drink up for me Reyes,” he says lightly, words lined with silk.

“Bellamy, we need to find water,” Octavia says, looking through her own pack to bring out her last two-liter container with anything in it, only to find a mere mugful.

Raven says something, but the words don’t reach their ears as they’re masked by the bottle.

Bellamy takes it away, hovering it around her face.

“I thought it would have rained…” Her voice is so faint- it’s vividly audible that she’s drifting in and out of consciousness. “Just seems like the universe is out to get us,”

She tries to smile, because of course she would. But it looks sinister beneath lips that have colored unnaturally, lined with frayed skin.

“Shut up Raven,” Octavia says down to her. “Save your energy.”

Clarke hears a twig snap behind her, and she turns quickly only to find Murphy hovering awkwardly.

He’s trying to make use of himself by keeping a look out, she guesses, or he just doesn’t want to look at Raven when she’s like this. Either way, Clarke doesn’t have time to think about this now.

Bellamy looks to her, determination obvious in his expression.

“We’re pretty high up. Let’s drop down and we’ll spend the day on the hunt for a river,” He nods his head.

Clarke struggles to think practically though, and her hands dart back to Raven, trying to look for any sign of the alarm bells drifting, regardless of if she knows that’s naïve.

“Her heart’s not right,” she whispers, hand pressed tightly to Raven’s torso. The drumming of it ricochets through her, but she can’t keep up with the pace of it.

“She needs the rest,” Bellamy says, gesturing to his last bottle. It’s about half empty.

“She’s burning up,” Clarke adds, her voice becoming more and more unsteady as it starts to sink in that she missed this, missed all of this completely.

How had she let her best friend get to this state without even noticing? Had she been too caught up in her own exhaustion, and in passively looking after Murphy too?

“Clarke,” Bellamy whispers, soft in the way that he’s started to save for her. “Listen to me. We’ll find water and we’ll get her some rest.”

His eyes are making promises she know he can’t keep, but the darkness of his pupils is so vividly black, so inevitably inky that she can spell out the certainty in them.

“Yeah, yeah okay,” she nods, feeling her head return once more.

He lets his eyes trace her face again, like he’s searching for something he can be sure of. And when he finds it, he looks to Murphy and calls out his name.

“You’ll have to take my bag so I can carry her,”

It’s incredibly awkward, getting the seventy-liter pack onto Murphy’s shoulders and his wince doesn’t fade when he’s got it secure, the shoulder of his broken arm twitching out the grimace.

He gives Octavia Raven’s gun and Clarke his, before he lifts Raven into an easy position, her knees hooked over his arm, his other arm strong under her shoulder.

He holds her like she weighs nothing, and Clarke steps over to give her more water.

“Raven?” she asks and waits for a response. “Keep drinking and get some sleep, please.”

“Clarke,” she mumbles, incoherently.

“You’ll be okay,”

Clarke says it, more for herself than for Raven, but it helps them both. She makes a mental note to check the head injury out as soon as they find water- there wasn’t a lot of blood, so it was probably just a scrape. It’ll be easier to check it out once they’ve actually made camp.

It takes all day, with a lot of tricky routes navigating dangerously steep contours. Bellamy doesn’t complain once about the weight of their friend.

Murphy grumbles occasionally about carrying the bag, because it’s the first time he’s had to carry anything, but he makes do because he has to.

They’re quiet.

Clarke spends the whole day fretting and panicking, checking on Raven every time she can. She looked at the head injury when they stopped for a five-minute break, and she was right in thinking it is just a surface wound.

They’ll have to keep an eye on it, and the fact that she keeps fading in and out of being awake doesn’t help with the prospect she might be concussed.

But they need to find water.

And they do, hours after sunset. Octavia hears the faint trickle at the same time as Clarke leans to feel the soil, sighing when she feels the moisture clasped in each grain.

They double-time it to the sound of the stream, and when they lay eyes on it, it’s the first running water they’ve seen in over a week.

“Ha!” Octavia laughs when they reach the edge of a small stream. “We did it,”

Bellamy heads straight over to a small clearing, with a diameter of about twenty feet, where he sets Raven down for the first time in hours.

He leans her back lightly onto a tree trunk; she’s awake now, has been for a while, but her body is still too weak.

He gestures to Murphy to ask for his bag, then pulls out a t-shirt with a large hole in it.

“Octavia, go and wet this. Murphy go with her and fill everyone’s bottles up,” he orders, taking the lead naturally.

He catches his sister’s wrist before she stalks away determined, and warns her to be careful, like he always does when they have to separate.

Clarke sits to Raven’s side and tries her best to keep her alert.

“Raven, can you hear me?”

“I’m tired,” she mutters into Clarke’s shoulder.

“I know. We found the stream,” she answers.

“That’s good. You’re starting to look like shit,”

Clarke laughs into her ponytail.

“We can’t all look like supermodels, Rae,” she smirks, then takes the damp t-shirt out from Octavia’s hands before she scampers away.

Holding the dripping wet fabric to Raven’s head, Clarke can see the relief that floods her features as her skin soaks up the moisture.

“I’ll start a fire,” Bellamy calls over, clearly making himself scarce to give the two some space.

It’s just one of the thousand small gestures he’s made that have made her day just that bit more manageable, so she sends him a smile that she hopes can convey her thanks.

He mirrors her instantly, his own sad smile lifting one side of his mouth, but they smile at each other nonetheless before he turns to start collecting firewood.

Murphy brings over a full two liters of water, then goes back to the water to fill up the rest of their canteens, glancing briefly back to Raven in a way that would be unnoticeable if Clarke’s gaze hadn’t flickered back to say thank you.

He’s wearing an odd expression- she hasn’t seen it on him before.

“What happened, Raven?” She asks quietly, once she’s made sure Raven has downed at least half of the bottle.

The brunette sighs and leans her head to rest against the tree trunk, wincing briefly as she knocks the bump on her head.

“I spilled the rest of my water everywhere when I was on watch the other night,” she says lazily.

“You should have said something,”

“It was my own fault,” she shrugs. “And if I’d told you, you would all be giving up yours.”

“So, you let yourself end up like this?”

“I didn’t think it’d take us this long to find water,”

There’s more on the tip of her tongue, so Clarke waits patiently for Raven to find the words.

When she does carry on, her voice breaks.

“And I thought I’d be stronger than this,” she mutters, sounding ashamed.

“You’re the strongest person I know,” Clarke says, as casually as she can while her heart breaks. “But we made a deal and it’s your turn now to honor it.”

“I’m sorry,” Raven whispers back, her eyes drifting closed now that she can finally rest properly.

“You’re okay. Keep drinking and get some sleep. I’ll go find something to eat,”

Clarke forgives her for being an idiot, because she knows Raven would do the same in an instant.

She’s more mad at herself because, thinking back to the last couple of days, she hasn’t seen Raven take a drink once. And she fell asleep on her watch the other night, which she had confessed the following morning when Murphy found her sleeping standing up.

How had Clarke missed that?

She shoots down a rabbit, but it’s foaming at the corners of its mouth, so she won’t risk eating it.

Just another failure.

She hunts for another half hour, but it’s too dark and she knows she’s not going to find anything worth it so Clarke heads back. However, as she approaches, Clarke starts to hear raised voices and she breaks into a run, her bow loaded in case they need her.

When she breaks into the small clearing, she sees nothing like she expected and she stops at the edge of the tree line, her bow spanning the area as she struggles to decide on what she should be aiming for.

Clarke can’t even process what’s going on; all she knows is she needs to intervene before someone gets hurt.

Raven is standing, looking more scared than Clarke has seen since the first week that they met, her face contorted like she’s in excruciating pain. She’s got her gun in her hands, no longer holding it with the ease and control she’s always had, now she’s waving it around in a frenzy.

And she looks murderous, completely ready to kill, like she is in no state of mind to hesitate pulling the trigger.

That’s not the worst part though, because sure she’s seen Raven a little unsteady before, surely she can handle all of that magnified. But the girl is pointing her gun straight to Octavia’s chest, barely enough distance between the two to squeeze another person in, no matter how much Bellamy seems to be trying.

Octavia looks more confused than anything, the cross between her eyebrows evidence of her mind travelling a hundred miles an hour.

She doesn’t look scared, but she’s displaying every emotion in between: a cross between sympathy and anger and bewilderment.

She’s stood frozen, making no move to reach for the pistol by her side and instead, her hands are held high, stretching ever so slightly towards Raven.

Bellamy is her stark opposite, his own expression one of clear determination and laced only at the edges with panic. He’s pressed himself against his sister, pushing himself forward as much as he can, creating a tiny wedge between the two girls.

Murphy is stood to the side once more, seemingly undisturbed until he glances to Clarke and raises his eyebrows towards the scene playing out before them. A _get your shit together and sort this out before they kill each other_ look.

“Where is he?” Raven close to shouts, voice still hoarse and cracking which only makes her sound more unstable.

“Raven, what are you talking about?”

“Don’t touch me!” Raven snaps, deadly, when Octavia tries to reach for her.

“It’s me, Raven. It’s O,”

“I don’t give a fuck who you are,” she spits. “Where’s my-“

In a flash, Bellamy has been pushed to the side and he stumbles over gracelessly. And in the next moment, Octavia has knocked the barrel of Raven’s rifle to the sky and she’s been disarmed within seconds.

Clarke only manages to actually take in what Octavia has done once Raven has been flipped to the ground, one hand pinned underneath O’s foot and the other clasped above her head, completely defenseless within seconds.

“What the hell is going on?” Clarke demands once she’s managed to put herself back together.

Bellamy glances up to her and the concern doubles, as now he’s got another person to look out for.

She crosses the space between them all, stepping towards the intertwined girls and ignoring Bellamy’s grunt of warning.

“Clarke?” Raven asks, all of a sudden sounding innocent once more.

Octavia looks over, still as confused as she was before she jumped on to Raven.

“She tried to shoot me,” Octavia exasperates, nodding down to the girl wriggling awkwardly under her.

“Let me go,” Raven groans, breathlessly.

“Octavia get off of her, her breathing still hasn’t gotten back to normal,”

O doesn’t make a single move; in fact, she only tightens the grip she has on Raven’s body. Until Bellamy crawls forward and snatches up the discarded rifle, shoving it away so that it’s out of reaching distance from all of them.

“Would someone like to explain to me what the fuck is happening!?” Clarke begs, losing her patience.

“I need to find Isaac,” Raven cries, still panting. “I thought he was with you.”

Clarke reels, suddenly understanding why Octavia had looked so incredulous before.

“Raven…” her voice softens considerably, yet she can’t find the words to explain.

“Let me go,” The brunette repeats, spitting the words.

“I will when you stop struggling,”

She must be delirious, her mind confusing the memories between what’s reality and what’s imaginary, a toxic combination of the dehydration and the very possible concussion she experienced during the fall.

So, it’ll be over with pretty soon. Clarke doesn’t doubt that it will hit her hard though, when she realizes that she’s not going to find her brother.

Clarke gets closer to them, then kneels down to the ground to place both of her hands either side of Raven’s face. She calms down, not immediately but near enough, and her eyes start to lose some of the alarm in them.

“Octavia, stop,” she whispers lowly, giving the go ahead to stop pinning her down.

She moves away, looking a little shaken, and falls into the arms of her brother.

Bellamy wraps his arms around her desperately, but he looks over her shoulder to make eyes with Clarke; it’s his turn to thank her. For what, she doesn’t quite know. But they’ve become pretty good at communicating without actually saying anything.

Clarke looks to Raven: she looks like she’s about to pass out once more, unbearably unhealthy.

“Let’s get you to sleep,”

“What’s wrong?” the brunette asks, yanking her head away in confusion. “Is Isaac not with you?”

“Raven, don’t you remember?”

“Remember?” she echoes.

“Isaac isn’t here anymore,” Clarke says clear and without pity. She decides to just rip the bandaid off, maybe kick some sense into her friend.

And then it dawns on her, Raven’s chocolate eyes filling while she lays unmoving on the ground and she lets out a broken sob that rings throughout the trees, bouncing off each one like a boomerang.

Clarke scrambles to hold her, cradling her head to her heart as tightly as she can without cutting off the airflow. She feels the lump at the back of Raven’s skull and sooths it as she strokes her fingers delicately over the wound that’s now scabbing over.

And Raven doesn’t cry, because she is way too dehydrated for that, but she dry sobs into Clarke’s shirt until the early hours of the morning. Having exerted herself in every possible way- mentally, emotionally, physically- Raven finally drifts off to sleep at around four in the morning guessing by Clarke’s internal alarm clock.

She holds her for just a while longer, needing to make sure that she’s actually okay this time before she leaves.

When she extracts herself, she glances over to the other side of the campfire, where Bellamy and Octavia have crashed, holding each other, on a nearby tree.

They look just as exhausted as she feels, she notices upon the realization that this has probably made the top five of their worst days in their whole trip.

‘Trip’ like it’s some kind of vacation.

There’s so much she wants to say to each of them.

She wants to reassure Octavia, to let her know that she handled that as well as she could have. And she wants to apologize for how close she’d been to death.

She wants to thank Bellamy for understanding everything she’s needed at every point today.

More than anything though, she wants to tell Bellamy to stop being so him.

Because everything about him makes her want to open up. To tell him about anything and everything and nothing. And the worst thing is, he makes her feel like that wouldn’t be a totally awful thing to do.

Instead, she crosses over to the campfire after dampening Raven’s face once more, to join Murphy as he stares into it, thinking way too much.

He hands her some nettles that Bellamy had managed to scavenge, but she turns her nose up at the thought of eating anything at all.

She isn’t sure what they’re going to do tomorrow; with Raven like this, she doesn’t know how much ground they’d be able to cover, nor if that’d be worth it.

Murphy’s bandage has turned a muggy brown but it’s the only one she had left.

He’s poking the fire awkwardly, probably content with the silence between them. That is, until he lifts his gaze over to Raven’s sleeping form and sits watching her. His eyes are curious over the flames, shadows dancing across his face in a pattern Clarke can’t decipher.

“She gonna be alright?” He asks, quieter than the crack of burning logs.

She’s sure he’s not worried, maybe he’s merely asking just to make conversation. But his voice lilts at the edges with something sort of similar to concern.

“She’s strong,” Clarke answers.

“Yeah,” he nods, more to himself.

She’s about to tell him to go and get some rest. She wouldn’t be able to sleep even if she tried so she may as well take the rest of the night’s watch.

He doesn’t look like he has any intention of moving, no matter how prominent the shadows under his eyes are.

And then he says something she really didn’t expect him to say.

“She reminds me of someone I knew once,”

He’s still so careful, so guarded because he’s not talking to Clarke. Not really. He’s talking to the only source of warmth they’ve got.

But she’s eager to lap up any ounce of backstory that he’s willing to offer, resorting to her small nest of savored memories and making some mental room for Murphy’s.

“I didn’t get to Nebraska on my own,” he starts clearing his throat and setting his jaw, like he’s gearing himself up.

“We found each other at the edge of my hometown. We’d been living in the same apartment block, so I’d seen her around, but we hadn’t really crossed paths until then.”

A pause, a deep breath and Clarke wriggles curiously so that she can hear him better. His voice is emotionless, void of anything because she doesn’t think he’d be able to tell her while he’s feeling.

There’s got to be a short circuit somewhere in his mind in order for his tongue to become loose.

“I’d never been in love before. That’s probably why I didn’t know what it was until it was too late,”

“What happened?” Clarke tries, when she notices he’s not going to carry on on his own.

“We hid in the stalls when it happened. And we were okay until we heard someone shout. The kid, he couldn’t have been older than eight and he was shouting for his dad. So, she went to him and never came back.”

He recites it like he’s reading from a recipe book, hints of sullenness buried in each monotonous statement.

“We had turned the showers on to drown out the noise that we made. After a couple hours I couldn’t wait anymore so I got up to go and look for her.

I slipped. I fell. And then before I even knew what was happening, there was a walker running past my head. By the time I managed to crawl back into my stall, it was pretty clear that I was trapped.

And I lost her.”

Another break in his voice, so he coughs briefly.

Clarke doesn’t reach to touch him; she knows it would just make him retract into himself. He doesn’t want her sympathy, or her pity.

“I couldn’t get out, especially not with my arm. I didn’t eat for days. I had to lap water up off of the floor like a fucking dog-“

Murphy stops himself before he lets the emotion start to seep into his words. He’s not telling her this out of obligation though.

Murphy doesn’t feel obligated to do anything for anyone; he’s made that much clear.

“What was her name?” Clarke asks, unable to think of anything else.

“Emori,” he answers, a sigh that escapes as a cloud of water vapor.

“Pretty,”

It sounds weak, and pathetic considering everything. But it _is_ pretty.

“No,” Murphy practically spits, finally meeting her eyes and snarling once more. He looks murderous again, having taken back his snarky mask. “She wasn’t _pretty.”_

She was more than that, Clarke thinks. At one point, she was everything to the man by her side. He’s rapidly closing himself off, she can see it in him.

But for now, he looks straight to her and is trying to convey everything he can’t say.

Like he’s pleading for her to understand, desperate to see if they really are as similar as she thinks they might be.

And then he’s back to watching the area just above the fire, his scrutiny focuses somewhere near the lone brunette, snoring softly in her sleep.

He watches her, like he’s waiting for her to wake up, or vanish into thin air. And Clarke watches him curiously, still unable to get a valid read.

“She’s strong,” he confirms, nodding his head toward Raven, and the conversation is over with.

He’s shuffling towards a vacant tree, having thrown a final log into the flames, and he doesn’t look back to anyone before he drops himself down. Out like a light in seconds.

Clarke spends the rest of her time alone in the starlight trying to fathom each word of his journey into order. She can’t imagine him ever having been open with someone- it’s odd to picture him caring.

She also doesn’t understand how he had let himself fall in love in a time like this.

She thought there was no time for it anymore, having seen nothing but death for the past couple of months has seemed to eradicate all traces of romanticism.

Like she’d said: emotions have to be the last resort.

They’re finite now, and that makes them valuable. Each shred of feeling she has left is a diamond, forged from the pressed soot they leave behind in footprints.

And something as strong as love is futile. Surely he’d known that. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to be naïve, not like that.

Love isn’t the primal instinct that it’s made out to be. If it were, then love should be easy, inevitable like thirst. But love is a tax that they can’t afford.

Raven’s hallucinations from this evening shook everyone up and she’s not sure how long they’re going to need to recover.

She peers cautiously at the siblings slumped against a tree, folded into each other like one person, and she lands her eyes on Bellamy.

The consistent rise and fall of his chest helps steady her thoughts, so she watches for as long as she can get away with and grants herself the hours to learn his face.

Each scar and scratch and the jet eyelashes that shield him from the night sky.

She wonders if he’s ever been in love. He’s too… feeling to not have been.

It took a lot to get them where they are now; easily placing trust into the other’s hands, but now that they’re here Clarke thinks that this won’t be broken.

Is that how he loved? With impenetrable armor held close to his chest, only for him to loosen it and wrap it around whoever had gotten his heart involved?

She doesn’t go to sleep.

The empty clearing is too busy for her to settle down.

She instead watches the sunrise as a new day starts to expose the ever-increasing problems, wondering what they’re going to do even if they reach Vancouver.

 

…

 

He’s the first one to wake up the next morning, grumbling about the crook in his neck and the hair that’s falling into his eyes.

Clarke smirks, calls him an old man, then sets about to boil some water, thankful to be saved from her own rampant mind.

“How are you?” Bellamy asks, taking the spot next to her by the fire. He nods, just slightly, over to Raven, his eyebrows clenched.

“I’m not the one you need to worry about,” she says quietly back, trying to keep her voice down for the others.

He makes a sound, something like a hum, and they sit together.

It takes a while for Bellamy to start becoming antsy but once he does, Clarke notices every little movement. She waits for the time he gives up sitting still in favor of marching about.

He doesn’t shift from where he is though.

He starts eyeing up the stream which flows patiently, no longer accompanied by the cold breeze that had been drifting through the air yesterday.

Everybody else is still sleeping softly, showing no signs of waking up any time soon. So, they’ve got time to kill.

“You want to go for a swim?” He asks, almost tentative.

He expects her to brush him off. She should do. They shouldn’t leave the camp unsupervised. But the stream is just over there, and she _wants_ to go.

“Sure,” she nods, swallowing the lump in her throat.

They walk over to it together, hands hanging awkwardly at their sides. When they reach the small ledge that leads to a slight drop over the water, Clarke hovers suddenly uncertain.

Bellamy doesn’t notice: he lifts his shirt over his head with ease and kicks off his boots, throwing them haphazardly into a pile against the closest tree.

She watches him carefully. She hadn’t really taken much notice the first few times that she’d seen him shirtless, but along the way she’s started paying more and more attention to the glimpses of olive skin. And to the way the muscles along his shoulders dance when he stretches.

His back is lined, too, with the freckles that grace his cheeks. She wonders if he’s ever seen these constellations, if he knows the stories behind those ones too.

She wants to reach out, to paint her fingers along the skin of his back, his arms, his shoulders. He turns around to face her, and the expanse of his chest silences her further.

His abs are like slabs of warm honey that have been chiseled to perfection, hard divots of sugar that define each one.

He stands with confidence, who wouldn’t with a body like that?

And then he’s shrugging off his slacks, toned legs captured in her view for only seconds before he dives in.

She tiptoes to the water’s edge, and it looks welcoming, ready to consume her.

Bellamy rises back to the surface, shaking his hair out, the canid gesture all too familiar. He sprays water from his mouth like something from a sculpted fountain, then looks to Clarke curiously.

“You coming in?” he smirks, kind.

It’s Clarke’s turn to shake herself out, taking mental note of a reminder: she can’t let herself get distracted, especially not with something as juvenile as a good-looking guy. Even if he is a _remarkably_ good-looking guy.

She’s never been ashamed of her body, and she tries not to feel like there are eyes running over the milky white of her skin before she recoils.

She removes the first couple of layers that she’s wearing, then remembers that she’s only got one spare sports bra which Raven is currently borrowing.

Unwilling to get this one wet too, she turns her back and lifts her vest top over her head.

Once she’s taken off the bra and deposited it with the rest of the clothes that she’s shed, she puts the vest top back on.

It covers up very little, the pale grey color of it exposing the contours of her breasts like it has been modelled around them. But she knew that this sort of thing would happen eventually. And modesty is a pipe dream now.

She takes her time unlacing each boot and makes sure to leave her underwear on when she takes off her pants.

She avoids looking over to Bellamy as she undresses, scared of what she might see.

Clarke hesitates briefly when her bare feet meet the ledge, her toes curling around the mudbank as she lets her toes soak up the fresh dirt.

Her gaze flickers over to Bellamy, inevitably. And he’s swum quite a way downstream, probably to give her some sort of privacy, obviously taking the hint that while she didn’t need it, the small luxury would be appreciated.

That doesn’t stop him glancing back sharply though, and she can’t read the expression he wears while his eyes flicker as fast as strobe lights, back and forth from her frame.

She jumps in, clumsily, and feels the breath escape her lungs. It’s knocked from her as the icy waves hit her and begin to pierce every inch of her exposed skin.

She kicks her way to the surface, legs flailing in an attempt to catch her breath once more.

The air feels only colder; when she rises to stand up her hair is already catching icicles between each curl.

Gasping her way through the pain, Clarke opens her eyes to see Bellamy smiling down at her.

He’s drifted back to her now, within reaching distance, submerged up to his shoulders.

“Fuck!” she cries out, uncontrollably. “It’s freezing,”

He laughs, lowly to himself before he starts to swim lazily around her.

“It is November, Princess,”

“You made it look like it was warm enough!” she says, accusatory as she thinks back to how gracefully he’d dived in, coming back and wading his way through the water with ease.

“It’s really not _that_ cold,”

He watches her as she tries to keep moving, doing what she can to warm up and acclimatize herself to the water.

It does feel good though, to feel the tide brush up against her skin, the painful current carrying away all of the dirt and grime of the past week.

She drops her head back to keep her face out of the water, and lets her hair drown, running her fingers through it to take out the puddles of grease that had formed on her scalp.

And he’s still watching her when she opens her eyes once more, his eyes glinting.

There are droplets lining his golden skin, beading down like sweat.

She makes sure to keep her chest below the water level, knowing that wearing the vest as concealment was pointless, because every bit of her torso has been revealed under the soaked top.

She’s still playing with her hair, undoing the little braids she’d woven in scattered areas when she was bored, when his jaw sets and his lips lift: mischievous and cunning.

“Bellamy don’t you dare!” she warns, slowly starting to inch away from him, raising up to her tiptoes to stop the riverbed from falling apart beneath her feet.

He stalks forward, grin only rising.

“I swear to God if you-"

She’s cut off.

The wave of water hits her face, making sure whatever part of her she’d managed to get dry becomes drenched once more.

Another strike of cold air washes over her, and the drops fall down across her face.

“You absolute prat!” she scolds, scrubbing the water out of her eyes. “I’m practically shaking,”

He’s biting his lip, trying as hard as he can not to laugh, as evident from the bruising that’s already starting to appear around his mouth.

He inches forward, hands reaching out in apology.

“Come on, Clarke. It’s called having fun,” he grins, boyishly.

“Really because being almost drowned doesn’t feel too much like-"

He gives up, creating another tidal wave that hits her so hard that she falls backwards, hands flailing.

She’s back up in seconds and ignores the icy chill in favor of setting her neutral expression to one of determination.

“Oh, you’re so gonna regret that,” she whispers.

He doesn’t look scared; he only smiles wider.

Bellamy doesn’t expect it, though, when she throws herself over him to knock them both to the bottom of the stream and Clarke can see that from the way he falters.

Her arms swing over his shoulders, so that she can yank him over and pull him off of his feet.

She doesn’t think about the fact that it throws their bare chests together, because his hands move to her waist instinctively and he’s pulling her down with him.

His fingers are impossibly warm against the ridge of her hipbone and the press of his palms into her stomach makes her feel like she’s being heated from the inside.

When they hit the water, he falls beneath her. For a split second, they hit the rocks at the bottom and Bellamy shields her, acting like a cushion as his arms tighten around her waist.

She keeps her eyes open underwater, to watch where they’re going and when she lands on top of him, she sees that he’s got his open too.

And he doesn’t look surprised: he looks practically gleeful, so so light.

His teeth, pearls lining the seabed.

It’s impossible not to mirror his smile. So Clarke does, and they lie with his back getting scratched by the deceptively sharp stones, giggling out in bubbles that carry away their oxygen.

She loses her breath first and presses against his heart to push herself back up to the top.

He takes her hand back though, clasping it and intertwining it within his own fingers so he can follow her.

They both come back up. Clarke’s hair sticks to her face, clinging as the water drags the curls back down.

They’re both still laughing, audibly now that they have enough air in their lungs.

But it doesn’t last for long because she still hasn’t gotten her own back. So she hooks her ankle around his knee to yank out his leg from under him.

There’s a brief flash of panic on his face before he goes back under, arms flying out which create a splash that drenches Clarke once more. And now it’s his turn to flail gracelessly.

She’s practically howling when he stands back up, his face returned to a deadpan as his ears start to turn rosy.

“Okay we’re even now,” Clarke gasps, trying to swallow the laughs. She raises her hands in surrender, then starts to step away as slowly as she dares.

“Nuh uh,” he laughs, shaking his head and wrapping his arms once more around her waist. “You aren’t running away now. Not after you started this,”

He tugs her back to him, so that her back crashes deep into his chest; his low rumble of a laugh ricocheting through her body. Seismic.

Clarke gasps, incredulous.

“ _I_ started this?”

His heartbeat is pressed to her shoulder, so quick she’s worried he’s in pain.

He seems to only now realize how close he’s pressed her to him because he chokes softly, stuttering over the deep breath he takes in.

Every part that Clarke feels his skin touch hers, separated only by a thin sheet of water, feels like it’s being set on fire. A sort of contact electricity stemming from whatever is happening.

She feels her cheeks flush, and her lungs need just that bit more air to function, her eyes fluttering so hard her eyelashes bruise her skin.

When Bellamy speaks, his voice cradles the shell of her ear.

“That’s how I remember it,”

Words barely a whisper.

“You’re imagining things Blake,” she warns, turning to press her cheek lightly into his heart, just because she can.

“I hope not,”

Clarke can’t be one hundred percent sure that the tightening of his grip is real; it’s too sparky.

He leans his forehead into her hair, oh so gently, and breathes in all the sweat and grease and grossness that she’s left to fester.

It’s a light breath. She wouldn’t have noticed it if she weren’t paying so much attention to him.

And then it kicks in.

This is _Bellamy_. And whatever this is, is not going to happen. It can’t happen between them. He’s too valuable. And she can’t afford to lose her head in all of this.

She pulls herself away, probably too hard and too sudden because she feels his head follow her like he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing.

Like his lips are chasing hers after a brief kiss.

She spins, hair still stuck to her face, and he looks like he’s been burned.

Clarke recovers much faster than she thinks she could, and throws a wave of her own his way, catching his stunned expression.

And the tension just drifts away like that. Ease returning like it had never become charged between them, even for a moment.

The war breaks out within seconds, as he regains his composure fluidly, shaking his head out again for the third time despite the lack of water actually dripping from his hair.

Clarke is laughing to the point where tears are starting to gather in her eyes.

She’s pretty sure the only time she isn’t being drenched is when he lets her stop to breathe every five minutes. It’s a pretty even match, and considering how competitive they both are, neither are ready to give up without giving it their all.

She’s needed this, Clarke decides.

An hour or two just to let herself go, have fun and stop worrying about what they’re going to do next.

They all do, but selfishly, she’s grateful that for now it’s just her and Bellamy.

He picks her up at one point, spinning frantically to try and make her as dizzy as possible.

He’s carrying her bridal style until he changes tactic and flips her over his shoulder, still whirling around.

Reaching around his sides, Clarke finds his stomach somewhere amongst the miles of muscle and digs her fingers in gently, hoping and praying that he’s ticklish.

He is, if the way he drops her, folding up in defeat, is anything to go by. Bellamy makes a sound, closer to a squeal than anything else but it’s still oddly low pitched and she lands face first into the stream, mouth wide open.

She swims her way back up to the top, remnants of a laugh still on her lips, the rest of it captured in her magpie memories along with the confirmed knowledge that he is in fact ticklish.

He’s looking at her through squinted eyes, planning his next attack but something catches Clarke’s eye behind him. There’s a movement over by the campfire and her head snaps to it instinctively.

It’s only Octavia, stepping along the fire like she doesn’t really know what to do with herself.

She’s looking over to the stream, a few feet away from where Bellamy and Clarke are wrestling like she’s trying not to make it obvious that she’s watching them.

She is though, watching them that is.

“Looks like they’re waking up,” Clarke says, only an ounce of disappointment gracing her words as she wrings out her hair.

She could have done this all day.

Bellamy looks over, still grinning toothily, then turns back to Clarke as reality slowly dawns upon his face.

The innocence seeps out like blood rushing from a wound, and he’s back to normalcy within seconds.

“We should probably head back,” he nods, throat bobbing.

“Yeah,”

She ignores the way her voice breaks.

He climbs out first, hanging over the ledge to give her an arm up. The leverage is too much because she goes flying straight into his arms, air tickling her feet as she soars.

He catches her, for the thousandth time, and his hands move to their chosen place as they hover lightly on her back.

And time stills, if only for a second, because now Clarke no longer has the coverage of the water to hide all of her exposed skin.

Bellamy’s eyes are so dark that she can see herself in them, blushing horrendously. She can blame that on the exertion of having thrown herself around for the last hour.

His gaze feels like fire. His breath tastes like smoke. Goosebumps prickle their way through every surface on her body, but she isn’t cold.

And this time, she can’t stop her gaze from flicking down to his mouth. How his lips have turned almost blue from the water, nearly swollen from the cold.

But then they’re gone, just like that, as he unwraps his arms from her side and turns away to put his clothes back on, a single visible shiver working its way down his spine.

Clarke is probably standing there, looking like a goldfish the way her mouth won’t quit hanging open. So, she slaps her teeth together so hard they might smash, and takes her vest off to wring it out, knowing he won’t turn around.

She redresses as quickly as she can because, without Bellamy’s arms around her, the cold suddenly hits her like another tidal wave.

She’s glad that she had the common sense to leave her bra to the side, because now she shoves the dry layers back on with ease, choosing to leave the vest off in fear of hypothermia.

No matter how much she tries to wring her hair out, the icicles spread persistently so she settles with a braid down the side of her head before she jogs back over to the fire, almost shoving her hands into the flames in an attempt to keep warm.

Octavia remains silent as they both take their seats on opposite sides, a knowing grin peeking out behind her pathetic attempt at a poker face.

“So…” she starts but doesn’t finish because her brother stands up, shrugs his heavier fleece off of his shoulders impatiently and stalks around the fire to shove it on to Clarke’s shoulders.

“Your teeth are giving me a headache,” he shrugs, reclaiming his seat.

She hadn’t even noticed how much her teeth were chattering, but they stop moments after she wriggles deeper into his fleece.

The smell of it surrounds her. Warm and kind of like sweat. Breathing it in is addictive.

“You two had fun,” Octavia finishes.

It’s not a question. There’s no doubt in the way she speaks, almost reverent like she can’t quite believe it herself.

Clarke meets Bellamy’s eyes and he’s smiling so soft it hurts.

“Yeah I guess we did,” she laughs, just a breath that escapes her lips a little too quickly.

He’s nodding at her, so yeah they did.

Clarke thinks back to one of the first conversations they shared that wasn’t heated, how he’d told her that it didn’t feel right to let himself be happy.

She hopes that this feels right.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'We lose our minds in a city of roses,'  
> \- Fire on Fire, Sam Smith


	8. So come on love, draw your swords

When Raven wakes up, she doesn’t look at anyone. Sparing not so much as a glance over to the campfire, she treads forward to the stream.

Murphy’s awake, has been for over an hour now.

They all silently agreed that they’d wait to see how Raven is feeling before they set off.

The week of intense hiking that they’ve just done has bought them enough time to take it a bit easier now.

Octavia has been commandeering the conversation, explaining to Murphy the differences between Karate and Jiu Jitsu.

He isn’t showing much interest in what she’s saying but he humors her for the most part, waiting patiently for her to get bored with whatever she’s rambling on about.

Clarke grabs her bow, then looks to Bellamy to see what he thinks of her going over.

She doesn’t want to crowd Raven. She’ll give her space if she needs it, but that’s never been the way that they’ve worked.

He nods once, firm, and it’s all Clarke needs before she jogs over to where Raven is currently washing her hair.

Clarke takes a seat, legs swinging over the ledge that drops down to the stream, and she waits for her friend to notice her.

“I know you’re pissed,” Raven starts, not even looking around. “But I don’t think I can take this right now,”

The thought to be mad hadn’t even crossed her mind, not since Raven’s episode last night. She couldn’t be angry at her, not after that.

“I’m not mad,” she says softly, hoping it’s enough.

Raven whirls around, sending a shower Clarke’s way.

“I fucked up,” she argues back, like she’s pushing for a reaction, like she wants to be scolded.

Clarke doesn’t want to bite. This isn’t what Raven needs.

“And we’re still okay,”

She scoffs, calling bullshit.

“Raven we’re okay. All of us. That’s all that matters,”

And then they’re hugging, cold seeping into Clarke’s clothes as Raven clings to her body.

She holds her back just as tightly though, thanking God for Bellamy’s fleece around her shoulders.

“How’re you feeling?” Clarke asks, reaching up to feel the faded lump on Raven’s head.

The other woman hisses slightly into her ear.

“Better than last night,” she shrugs, but none of it feels light. His name hangs in the air.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I woke up and everything felt dark again, like it was the night he did it. It just felt so real…”

Clarke squeezes her tighter, not sure what she can say to help.

“I guess he’ll never really leave,”

Raven wants to let him go. They both know it’s time, but just like the way Clarke’s parents follow her around with every step she takes, she understands.

“Please don’t do that to yourself again,”

Raven nods, and it’ll be okay. Well, as okay as it can be.

 

…

 

They do all try to make an effort to cover some ground, but there’s no spirit behind it. They barely hike ten miles before someone suggests they make camp again.

It’s early and the sun is still up.

There’s wind blowing in strong gales from all around, so they take shelter at the base of a steep hill which isn’t very comfortable and there is no water anywhere nearby.

They also choose not to set up a fire; the wind would just blow it out if they even managed to harness any sort of spark.

So, it’s cold, deafening under the swirling breeze, and if Clarke doesn’t _do_ something then she’s going to go crazy.

She’s sat at the base of the hill. If she were to lie down, she’d still be positioned almost vertically.

Octavia is perched at her hip, the same fidget controlling her movements.

“So you weren’t lying about being a black belt, huh?” Clarke questions, thinking back to how quickly O had managed to disarm Raven last night.

The brunette turns to her, smile leaning just like her brother’s does.

“I guess not,”

She sounds guilty, glancing over to where Raven is cleaning the mud off of Murphy’s face.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she whispers, words rolling off her tongue.

“You did the right thing,” Clarke shakes her head. “You and Bellamy could have both gotten hurt if you hadn’t done something,”

“Yeah, I know,”

“Raven understands that,”

“I hope so,” Octavia mutters as she twirls her fingers. “Want me to teach you?”

“Huh?” Clarke asks, absent-mindedly.

“You tried to teach me how to shoot. I guess I could return the favor,”

What’s she got to lose? She decides, so stands up to brush off her slacks, preparing herself.

“As long as you don’t break my leg,” she laughs, only a hint of a warning.

Octavia waves her off with a casual flick of her hand and a smirk, then leads Clarke over to a flatter bit of ground.

Clarke has always been what she liked to call ‘vaguely athletic’, having spent her life hunting in the woods near her home, she’s had to stay physically fit.

She did ballet for a couple years and being an archer has made her mildly agile.

But she’s nothing like Octavia, who looks like she’s practically dancing when she fights. Moving so quickly that Clarke can in no way keep up, her arms and legs extend in directions that should not be normal.

They spar for about an hour, and Clarke gets floored countless times. Her back smashes into the mud, thudding so hard she’s pretty sure it’ll be all blue by tomorrow.

She thinks that Octavia is going as easy as she can on her, letting her pathetic attempt to fight back last more than just a few seconds.

And she might be able to take a few small moves away from this. That doesn’t mean it’s anywhere close to fun- the only enjoyable parts are when Octavia gets properly into it, her eyes setting with so much focus that she might pass out.

Or when Clarke lands with her legs and arms knotted like a pretzel somehow, and the brunette breaks out into fits of snickers that bounce across the trees.

It’s all forearms, and elbows, and knees to the stomach, that Clarke has to stream all of her concentration into defending against.

She can see why Octavia enjoys it- if she were actually any good at it, she probably would too.

But when she calls time as the sun sets, Clarke can’t help but feel relieved that she can just crash now.

They slump down, after carrying their packs over to the others where the three of them have gathered.

Murphy has almost fallen asleep; Bellamy is wearing a pout like he’s pissed off at something that Raven must have said, and Raven is all serious again.

They’ve clearly walked in on something, because there’s tension hovering like a chord between the two of them.

Clarke looks to Raven, who only shakes her head.

“So, I finally found something that Clarke can’t do,” Octavia squeals, nowhere near as breathless as Clarke feels, with her cheeks probably bright red while beads of sweat drip down her forehead.

Bellamy turns to his sister, forcing a smile on to his face.

“Yeah?”

“Hey!” Clarke gasps. “I wasn’t that bad,”

The look on Octavia’s face says everything and Clarke holds her bow a little closer to her chest. At least she’s still got that.

“How come you don’t fight like that normally?” she wonders aloud.

Octavia shrugs then glances to her brother cautiously.

“I guess I’d have to get too close. It’s safer just to shoot,”

Bellamy looks to Clarke, unapologetic. She’s still wearing his fleece and has decided she will until it stops smelling like him.

 

…

 

Raven doesn’t ask to take first watch, but she makes it pretty clear by the hard set of her shoulders.

Clarke tries to get away with staying up with her, but Raven calls bullshit and sends her to bed with a punch to the shoulder, which throbs when she hits a point that Octavia had relentlessly targeted before.

“Who was Isaac?”

Clarke stirs in the middle of the night. Having been passed out cold for hours, she’s wide awake now. She doesn’t open her eyes though; she just stays exactly where she is to hear what they’re saying.

It doesn’t feel like eavesdropping. Maybe that’s just because she’s just woken up and is a bit too lazy to open her eyes.

It’s Murphy’s voice; he must’ve woken up a while ago because it’s coming from the same direction that Raven’s heavy-set breathing is coming from.

Clarke hears a sigh before Raven answers him, tired and reluctant. But she answers him, which is a step forward.

“My brother,”

“I’m sorry,” he gruffs out, instantly.

“It’s not your fault,”

Clarke can picture her shrug.

“I know that,”

He’s making an effort. For what reason, Clarke can’t decide.

“How’s your head?” he asks after she doesn’t answer him.

“Same as ever. I can barely hear myself think but I don’t think I’m going to have another mental breakdown if that’s what you’re asking,”

Clarke can hear a small lilt in her response, like she’s trying to smile as best she can.

“That’s always handy,”

Silence.

“Have you had any luck with the radio?”

Clarke had given it to Raven this morning, as soon as they had re-joined the group and after she’d whispered over to Murphy, making sure he was okay with it.

Raven had been trying to get her hands on it all week, but Murphy still wouldn’t let her. It was, after all, his last possession.

Clarke had thrown the clothes he’d been wearing at Nebraska in the fire the night after they found him. They were practically crawling in vomit and toilet water, so it wasn’t a hard goodbye.

Clarke had wanted to give it to her friend immediately, knowing if anyone could get it working then it’d be Raven. But she’d been patient and waited for him to be ready.

Her eyes had lit up when she held it in her hands for the first time and set to work instantly. Some people need ice cream to cheer themselves up, or a strong drink, or some good music. For Raven, it’s always been a broken bit of tech.

“No, but I’ll get there,” Raven answers, no doubt in her voice.

There’s quiet again. That is, until Murphy clears his throat, gearing himself up to say whatever he needs to.

“When my arm is better, I’ll help more,”

It’s not what Clarke expects to hear, and suddenly she feels guilty for listening in on their conversation. Like it’s something that she shouldn’t be a part of.

If she were to make it clear that she’s awake now, it’d just be awkward. And pretending that she’s only just woken up would stop whatever conversation they’re about to have.

“I do want to. I would if it weren’t for…”

He’s probably gesturing to his arm as his voice breaks out.

Clarke doesn’t know why he’s saying what he is. And Raven mustn’t either, because she bites:

“What are you talking about Murphy?”

“The other day, when I said to you-“

“Save it,” Raven snaps, and then there’s a shift in the light behind Clarke’s eyes as the moonlight is blocked out by a movement nearby.

Something is draped over her body, covering nothing more than her torso. It smells distinctly like Raven, so Clarke snuggles into it.

The footsteps get quieter as they inch away from where she’s ‘sleeping’.

“I haven’t got time for grudges,” Raven finishes, clearly taking her seat once more.

Another wave of fatigue washes over Clarke. She’s wearing Bellamy and she’s being sheltered by Raven, so it feels perfectly natural to drift back off, falling deeply back into a dreamless sleep.

 

…

 

Murphy kicks her awake the next morning, wind having only intensified and she’s the last one to stop sleeping because everyone else is huddled a few feet away.

She starts grumbling, muttering sullenly about being left to rest, then shrugs down next to Bellamy.

Telling herself that she’s chosen the tallest person out of everybody for the completely logical reason that she can use him to block her from the wind, she leans into him just a bit more than what should be normal.

It’s not so noticeable that he has any sort of reaction.

Murphy sits on her other side, nudges her shoulder to bring her attention to the dried-out crackers he’s holding out for her to take.

This morning feels oddly domestic, uncomfortably so.

She’s about to lean away from Bellamy, so as not to make him feel weird, but that’s when he swings his arm around her.

It doesn’t touch her back, just rests behind her so that he leans on to it. It happens so naturally; Clarke doesn’t think he even realizes he’s doing it while he continues to talk aimlessly to his sister.

And now her shoulder is hooked under his, so easily she could rest her forehead onto his shoulder, balancing it in the same place she had the night that she had her nightmare, and nothing would change. Physically that is.

Who knows what would change if she were to actively acknowledge how close they’re sitting?

“There’s a storm coming,” she hears Raven say on Octavia’s left. “I can feel it in the air,”

She’s right. There is a moisture that wasn’t here yesterday.

“What are the options?” Murphy asks. He’s not afraid to speak up anymore, which makes Clarke smile faintly to herself.

“There aren’t really any,” Octavia adds in. “We’ve just got to keep walking,”

There’s something that she’s not saying, something lingering behind her words.

Bellamy is drumming his fingers into the ground behind Clarke, tapping something out absent-mindedly.

This is dangerous, she thinks.

She hated this man only a few weeks ago; she would have loved nothing more than to see the last of him, to never have to deal with his juvenile sulks again.

And now, she’s noticing something else. A whole different side to him. And the thought of losing that makes her actually, physically hurt.

She hasn’t looked at him yet, can’t bring herself to do it.

He answers them as they wait for his reply.

“We’re gonna have to wait it out somewhere. We can’t walk through it,” he says, shaking his head in thought.

She wishes she could think about this. Clarke really does. But the stubble lining his jaw is too distracting.

This is normal, right? She’s sat this close to Raven countless times. The fact that she can hear her own heartbeat in her throat means nothing.

When did she get to this?

“We’ve been so lucky this week. You think we’ll get away with not seeing any walkers for a while?”

“I don’t know,” Raven muses. “It’s been weirdly quiet,”

“Maybe it’s the cold?” Clarke asks, schooling her expression.

“You think that might mean something?” Bellamy asks, forcing her to look at him for the first time.

Fuck him and his eyes.

“I don’t know,” she shrugs, looking to her boots.

Murphy chips in, cutting the chord between them.

“I think we should keep walking until the storm sets in. It’s not like we’ll find any shelter by sitting around and waiting for it. And we want to get to Vancouver as soon as we can,”

He doesn’t notice his slip-up, but everyone’s eyes shoot to him.

 _We._ He said we.

It doesn’t take much convincing because he’s right: staying where they are is going to do nothing to help them.

They pack up and Clarke takes a minute to nurse the bruises that Octavia has given her while no one sees.

She’s glad she’s got them though, because now she knows how to keep the mouth of a walker away from her for as long as possible.

She falls into step next to Murphy as they walk, accidentally.

Raven leads the way; Clarke guesses it’s because she thinks she still needs to redeem herself which is ridiculous.

Octavia is keeping her company.

Their relationship seems to be fragile ever since Raven held a gun to her face but that is nothing that Clarke should get involved with and they’re both adults. They’re both capable of healing themselves on their own.

Still, Clarke can’t help but look out for them both, craning to see if they’re at least talking to one another. And they are, though it’s tentative and slow-going. It’ll need time.

“So…” Murphy starts, sounding as casual as ever. “Vancouver?”

She’s been expecting this. Ever since he opened up to her, she hasn’t really got a reason not to tell him now.

There’s clearly a level of trust that he’s deemed viable.

“It’s complicated,”

“When isn’t it?” he smirks.

“Me and Raven have this… friend,”

He feels like so much more than that. Wells has always been her brother in every way but blood.

Bellamy chokes on something behind her, and he’s looking incredulous; like Clarke has just said something worth a revelation.

She raises her eyebrows, but he just shakes his head and gestures for her to ignore him.

“I grew up with him and he was studying medicine in Vancouver. I figured it’s the only place worth going even if he isn’t there, but I need to know. I need to at least know if he made it,”

Murphy nods, takes it in, then turns around to Bellamy.

“And you?” he asks.

Bellamy grimaces and rolls his eyes but entertains the man anyway.

“Our mother is there,”

He doesn’t elaborate. Even Clarke doesn’t know why she’s there but he’s certainly not going to tell her in front of Murphy, even if he is willing to tell her at all.

“There’s a base,” Clarke adds, remembering they might have forgotten to tell him that. “It’s one of the only ones I know of that are left. If it’s still there, it won’t be a problem for you to stay with us,”

He snorts, humorlessly.

“Don’t hold your breath, Clarke. I’ve seen how easy it is for those things to go down,”

She doesn’t respond to that: memories of a middle-aged woman crawling up her body flashing across her mind.

“So, this Wells is special enough for you to cross the country for?”

It’s exactly what Octavia had asked when they’d sat around their first campfire.

She doesn’t want to tell him that Wells and Raven had a special sort of connection, feeling like that’d be grimy for some reason.

And telling him that it’s the only family she’s got left feels like a lie now.

“I guess,”

“Well, I can play happy families,” he decides, bumping her shoulder with his bad arm. “Gotta love a bit of make believe,”

He heads forward, apparently done with the conversation. So, Clarke drifts back to meet Bellamy, walking next to him in easy silence.

He’ll offer her a walnut along the way, and when she stops to get her bottle out, she’ll get out his too.

And it’s so comfortable.

 

…

 

“I thought you and Wells were… a thing,” Bellamy stammers out halfway through the day.

“You what?” Clarke chokes, almost laughing.

He’s blushing again, she can practically feel the heat radiating off of him.

“Bellamy, Wells and I grew up together,” she explains.

He only shrugs, clearly not convinced.

They’re still low in a valley, hoping they might stumble upon another river as they hide from the rising winds.

“Whatever you thought we were, I can assure you that we’re not,” she says, still trying not to laugh.

“You’re not?” he echoes, his words carried away by the chill in the air.

Her nose scrunches up at the thought of it.

“Definitely not,”

She’s seen Wells in all the ways that make it impossible to go in that direction. And she’d never even if she could.

“Our parents always thought we’d get married, holding our heads together as though we’d eventually figure out that it was easier to kiss than fight it,”

Bellamy’s looking at her funny until she rolls her eyes.

“Not literally, Bell,”

He breathes a laugh, shaking his head rapidly in the way only he does.

He’s dribbling a stone along the path that they’ve found, kicking it between his toes as they walk.

They’ve fallen quite far behind the others, who are walking in a line playing a weird, competitive sort of hopscotch.

“What even made you think that?”

He looks up to the sky, trying to think.

“Um, I guess I just assumed along the way?” he answers, saying it like he genuinely doesn’t have a clue.

She wants to ask, not because it’s at all important anymore, but she’s just too curious.

“What about you? Any special girls back home?” she sounds casual. Good.

He takes a second to think, then looks to her.

“Not that I can think of,” he says with so much ease.

She snorts; of course he wasn’t involved.

With the way he looks and his seemingly nonchalant exterior, he must have had girls falling at his feet. He mustn’t have had to try at all, let alone have to go to the effort to become attached.

“Classy,” she smirks, unable to help herself.

If he was a player, she’s going to take every comedic benefit from that fact that she can.

His eyes go wide, and he reaches up to scratch at his neck.

“Um, yeah I guess that didn’t come out right,” he says, laughing nervously.

Yeah, this guy definitely had no issues with the ladies.

“I mean it’s the truth,” Clarke shrugs, nudging his shoulder maybe a little too hard as he pretends to topple over like a cartoon character. “I guess that’s always better.”

There’s a clumsy awkwardness that hovers over them, like they’re having this conversation in middle school against the lockers.

“So, Wells isn’t the love of your life?” he clarifies, breaking the tension with a low-pitched laugh.

She can’t help the fact that she scrunches up her nose again; it’s almost like a reflex.

“Definitely not. And anyway,” she says, only speaking her mind. “I couldn’t do that anymore,”

His face goes all serious, and he nods understandingly.

She doesn’t think they’ve ever been on the same page as much as they are now, because he looks over to his sister and everything becomes clear.

His priority is Octavia. And it’s always going to be her. He can’t let anyone else get in the way of that.

“Anymore?” he asks.

It’s the wrong word, because she’s never really been in love. Sure, there was Finn. He got the closest to her heart, but she’d never call them love.

She shrugs, not knowing how to clarify what she means without seeming like she’s thinking way too much about this.

“What’s your mother like?” she questions instead, changing the subject as subtly as she can.

This is the best opportunity that she’ll get to ask, with the other three still miles ahead and preoccupied with whatever game they’re playing.

And they’ve got time, kicking stones along the never-ending tree line.

He asks her why she wants to know, not defensive like he used to be, just cautious.

She answers that they’ve got to do something to fill the time, not quite letting on that she is almost overflowing with curiosity.

He thinks, for a moment, and then he’s gone.

He rambles to her about a woman who looks like the spitting image of Octavia, telling stories of lazy pancake Sundays or times when they would get snowed in at the top of their apartment tower, having only the rusted fire escape to watch from while they drank cocoa.

He tells her about a woman who wore torn clothes for years, because any money they had would go to Octavia.

He gives her stories of a woman who practically hunted him down when he tried to get a job at ten years old without telling her.

And Clarke soaks each one up.

She thinks back to when he said that his mother didn’t hang around with the right people. How he had to tuck Octavia under the floorboards at night. But the side of his mother that he has endless tales of seems to eclipse all of that in his mind.

So this is what it feels like to be close with your mother, she thinks somberly when he begins to lyric about the dress she made Octavia for her senior prom.

It makes her feel guilty, for never having tried that hard to have a relationship with her own Mom.

Especially after she’d sacrificed herself for her daughter in a way that was over before Clarke knew it.

The images that flash through Clarke’s mind of the day of the infection start to shutter like they’ve been taken on one of those instant cameras. Tea-stained and folded at the corners, grown tired with time.

Their home, center of town so that Abby Griffin had quick access to the hospital, with the windows smashed and the door hanging wide.

When Bellamy returns her own question, Clarke doesn’t consider not telling him.

He’s just poured out the only memories of his mother that he wants to keep. Clarke decides to give him the only memory of her mother that matters anymore.

“She was probably the most high maintenance woman you’d ever come across in your life,” she starts, sighing and refusing to romanticize her mother’s life. “We were never close- there was never any reason to be,” she explains.

“I had my father; she had her work. We basically just co-existed and by the time I left for school, I’d made so many mistakes that we were broken.

Then my dad died in my final year and that was it. The final nail,”

He walks, by her side listening intently like he’s holding on to every word she’s saying.

“The day of the infection-“

Bellamy cuts her off, sucking in an audible breath.

“Clarke you don’t have to,” he starts but she waves him away.

“I was at home for the first time in a long time. My mother had been working in the hospital, I think she was the first one to try to treat an infected and she came home as soon as she figured out how bad it really was,”

She laughs to herself despite it all, and Bellamy looks at her while he waits for her to explain why she’s sniggering.

“I was at home in my favorite pajamas when she came through the door. She told me we had to run, and now, so I ran upstairs, found my hiking pack and packed it with whatever I could remember. I didn’t even realize what I was wearing until I got to the front door, boots laced and bow in hand.

She told me to go change. I must’ve looked fucking crazy, looking like I’m about to go hunting in little duckling pajamas,”

Bellamy smiles too, clearly trying to fathom the image.

“We almost made it to the edge of town, but we had to get through the city and by then the streets were crawling and we got stuck at a dead-end.

She caused a distraction, holding my father’s old hunting rifle like she was the one who had looked after it all those years.

Told me to run. Told me my dad would have been proud of who I turned into. And then she sprinted the other way, deep into the heart of the city.”

“I’m so sorry, Clarke,” he whispers.

“It’s okay,” she says, smiling at how sincere he sounds. “She wanted me to live so I guess it wasn’t for nothing,”

He nods, unable to find what to say. She doesn’t need him to say anything at all; just walking next to him, listening to his heavy and slow breathing, is all the comfort that she needs.

It feels weirdly good to get the story of Mrs. Griffin off of her chest, like sharing it with someone else makes the whole thing lighter.

 

…

 

“Clarke, I need to talk to you,” Octavia starts when they have made camp.

There’s still too much wind for a fire, something Clarke has begun to regret she didn’t cherish when they had one.

“Are you okay?”

Her head snaps up, reading into the worry in the other girl’s words.

They’re out of earshot of the others, who are scouting the area for some mushrooms that they might be able to eat.

“You can’t tell Bellamy,” she says, taking a seat on top of her bag and bringing her elbows to lean on her knees, conspiratorially.

It’s serious, whatever it is, so Clarke nods her head.

“It’s probably nothing. In fact, I’m sure it’s nothing, but I wanted to tell you just in case I’m not-”

“Octavia,” she interrupts, laying her palm on O’s shin to stop her rambling. “What’s wrong?”

Bellamy has walked off behind a tree which is probably for the best because if he saw the way that they’re sat, he’d definitely know something is up.

“I just saw how bad Raven got and I don’t want to keep it from every-“

“O,”

“I’m not feeling great,” she sighs, rubbing her face.

“Okay?” Clarke answers, waiting for more information.

“It started a couple nights ago, and I thought it was just a sore throat but now I’m running-“

Clarke doesn’t wait around; she holds her hand up to Octavia’s forehead and presses against it with the back of her palm. She’s burning up and there’s already a cold sweat gathering at her hairline.

“I think it’s just a virus or something, because of the cold,” Octavia says, leaning into the cold of Clarke’s hand.

“We need to tell the others, O. This could be serious,”

She can’t hide this from them.

“But if it’s nothing then I don’t want Bell to worry,” she argues back. “I’m probably just overreacting, and I’m strong Clarke I can fight this off,”

Her voice is hoarse, Clarke can hear it now.

“Octavia this isn’t nothing,”

And there is a storm coming. They’ve all come to an agreement that they need to find any shelter they can before the storm really kicks in.

They’re in a park somewhere, but there have been signs all around pointing their way to a nearby farm.

Raven had noticed the pointers along the footpaths, and argued it was probably their best bet at finding shelter.

There’s the hope that they might even find survivors, if the farm is as remote as this, but Clarke’s not holding her breath.

“Clarke, please do this for me,” the girl pleads.

She thinks for a moment.

“Okay here’s what we’ll do: let’s wait until we get to the farmhouse. If you’re still feeling like this then, then we’re going to tell everyone,”

Octavia nods hurriedly, clamping her lips together in promise.

If anything happens to her, then it’ll be the end of them all. Clarke knows that, so she isn’t going to let her go no matter what this is.

 

…

 

Clarke falls asleep with her boots pressed against the soles of Bellamy’s feet. Neither of them wake up with any nightmares.

 

…

 

It starts raining once more when they set off the next morning, cold enough for it to turn to hail at any second.

Now that she knows about Octavia feeling under the weather, Clarke rapidly starts to notice the shiver in her shoulders, the one that the brunette manages to conceal by adding another layer.

She also notices the green tinge to her face, that O covers up by pushing herself just that little bit harder, so that her cheeks start to flush with exertion

Clarke wants to reach out and force her to take more breaks, but she knows that she’ll just say no every time; too strong willed for her own good.

Octavia avoids Bellamy all day, not so much to cause concern, but if she were to spend any more time with him then he’d definitely catch on.

It doesn’t take very long, though, before Clarke finds she can stop brainstorming distractions, because Murphy spots the farmhouse somewhere along the horizon, shrouded in rain clouds that grow only darker.

“Land ahoy!” he says, sounding nothing more than unimpressed.

Bellamy claps him on the shoulder, before he makes a comment about how Murphy should appreciate any shelter they can get, not without a quick deck to the head.

It takes them all day to get there: the horizon is surprisingly far away, always seemingly out of reach and way too high for one day’s climb, but when they reach the small picket fence that lines the acres of farmland, Clarke can’t help but feel that they’ve been granted a miracle.

Bellamy lifts everyone over one by one, regardless of their complaints to stop mothering them, and their sullen remarks that he should let them look after themselves.

The first thing they see as they make their way towards the small cluster of buildings is a group of pens that have been left bare empty, wooden strips scattered across the ground, animals long gone.

There’s an unnaturally deep bite mark in one of them.

Clarke takes note of it and throws it over to Raven as a warning.

This place, however empty it is, has been contaminated.

The broken pens outline the few buildings. The central one looks like a romantic cottage with exposed cobble stones and honeysuckle and ivy lining the walls.

It doesn’t feel right to see somewhere like this in the dusk of a world that has been ruined.

It’s so normal, so homely. This is the type of place where Clarke might have wanted to grow old, after she’d seen all she’d wanted to see, and done everything she’d wanted to do.

Just wide-open ground, woods as far as the eye can see and a home so quiet you can actually hear yourself think.

There’s no smoke coming out of the chimney, despite the stacks of prepared firewood piled up high into a pyramid around the side of the cottage, sheltered from the rain by an over-hanging roof.

The second largest building has been painted a diminished maroon color with the white wooden beams like something out of a fairy tale.

There are a couple other indoor enclosures but they’ve each been tampered with in some way or another, left now with gaping black holes.

They give themselves only a few moments to take it all in and relish in their discovery, before Bellamy tells Raven and Octavia to check out the barn while he, Clarke and Murphy scout the cottage.

She finds it strange that he’s so okay with letting his sister out of his sight in such a risky place and tells him such when they open the bright red front door.

“She can take care of herself,” he shrugs, lifting only one shoulder.

Clarke doesn’t buy it for a second.

“Please,” she snorts and follows his lead, scanning the entryway with her bow raised and loaded. “Who are you and what have you done with Bellamy Blake?”

He smirks as he gestures for Murphy to stay behind them.

“You and I both know, if we’re gonna find a walker, it’s not going to be in a locked barn,”

He proves his point as they enter a quaint living room, the pendulum of a grandfather clock being thrown of course by the draft flowing through a broken window.

“Glad to hear I’m expendable,” Clarke replies, saying it without an ounce of seriousness, hiding the smug smile she wears in the shadows.

She hears Murphy breathe a laugh behind her and she nods her head around to look at him.

“You and me both,” he says, and Clarke thinks she catches the wink he throws her way in the darkness.

Bellamy’s gaze is still flickering forward, from left to right and he’s concentrating so much that he probably doesn’t catch on to the joke in the air.

“It’s not like that,” he snaps, shaking his head disappointedly.

“What’s it like then?”

Now that he’s acting weird, Clarke wants to know what he’s talking about more than anything, but she never gets her answer because something creaks, quietly, almost nothing, but all three of their heads shoot straight up to the ceiling.

Bellamy’s eyes find hers.

Clarke raises a finger to her lips, all joking forgotten now.

She turns around to Murphy.

“You’ve still got that knife, right?”

He makes a whispered grunt, eyes still trained on the ceiling as though it’s about to cave in.

“Clarke I’m going to go check upstairs. You hear me shout, I want you to take Murphy and run,”

He’s moving so quickly; Clarke barely has time to comprehend that he’s trying to leave.

Spinning around just in time to catch his wrist, he flinches and jumps unsuspectedly.

“Bellamy,” she says, stern with volition she didn’t know she has. “Not this time.”

It’s a whisper. It’s a promise.

He takes her in, eyes wide as though he might be able to read her better. And she looks between each crevice of his face, waiting for him to find what he’s looking for.

“Together?” He asks, his chestnut eyes absorbing _everything_.

“Together,” she affirms, squeezing her hold on his wrist.

Murphy clears his throat, shaking them out of whatever this is.

“Not that I’m in any rush to come face to face with another one of those things, but could guys maybe find a better time to-“

“Can it Murphy,”

Bellamy nods to Clarke for a final time then they take off, creeping up the varnished steps to follow whatever sound they’d heard.

Master bedroom. Next to a bathroom with one of those stand-alone bathtubs peeking out.

Bellamy kicks the door open, without hesitation, and shoots his gun before Clarke even heads in, having shoved Murphy in between the two of them.

All she sees is the silhouette of an old woman, still gurgling up nightmares and haunted terrors in the dimmed room.

Bellamy’s eyes meet hers, and Clarke’s about to tell him that it’s okay, that he’s okay, because she’s so used to telling herself the same mantra after each kill.

She doesn’t get the chance.

His eyes go wider than she’s ever seen them, the question dying on her lips when an ice-cold hand wraps its way around her neck: a vine tugging with all the force of quicksand.

She smells death, that’s one thing she can take in before another hand lands on her forehead, hitting her so hard that her vision goes blurry.

And then her face is being wrenched, quick enough to give her whiplash, and she starts to fall closer and closer into the waiting teeth of an obese old man, balding hair matted into a frenzy.

Her bow is still down by her thigh, loaded with an arrow but trapped between their bodies along with her arms.

She takes the arrow out of its rest and plunges it as deep as she can into the stomach of the walker.

As expected, it has no effect, but she needs to try, she needs to fight.

_She wants to live._

Removing the arrow, she squirms to take her hand free, to buy herself some time to make some wiggle room. But then there’s a fist, soaring so close to her head, holding a small dagger that Clarke barely has time to recognize.

It drives its way through the man’s temple, hitting skull with an echoing crunch, and the walker falls limp as it starts to plummet to the floor.

Clarke is frozen.

With the walker’s hands still wrapped around her face and neck, she is brought down with it, its weight crushing each bone as she hits the floor.

The knock to the head serves as a wake-up call, and suddenly the now _completely_ lifeless man has squeezed all of the air out of her body.

She can’t breathe, like at all, and no matter how hard she tries to take in oxygen, there’s no room left in her chest cavity.

Something grabs at her shoulders, and the moment her hands become free, Clarke starts to swing her arms around.

With eyes held shut as tightly as they’ll go, she has no idea what she’s aiming for, but it doesn’t matter because she can’t let herself freeze up again.

She makes contact with the body as much as she can, batting at the hands that are gripped firmly to her shoulders.

“Clarke, hey,”

It’s Bellamy’s voice but she doesn’t register it like she should.

“It’s me Clarke,”

She opens her eyes slowly, her hands dropping to her side when she takes him in.

Clarke takes in one deep breath, finally able to let go of her light headedness.

She winces, her knees still trapped under the walker’s shoulders. Bellamy’s senses seem to kick in and he crouches down, shuffling her the rest of the way out until she’s completely free.

Murphy hovers in the corner of her eye, stood at the foot of the body on the look-out.

Bellamy doesn’t seem to care, having settled down in front of Clarke, holding either side of her face to center her.

His gaze seems to flit to both above and below her eyes before he runs his fingers, as light as stardust, over the place that the walker had imprinted his own hands.

She feels his thumb run over something glossy, sticky to her skin, and he’s watching the way his thumb moves intently.

Clarke takes her time to get her breath back, hoping the smell of it isn’t too rancid as she pants into Bellamy’s face.

He doesn’t seem perturbed, cleaning her off as though he might be able to wipe away the fear.

When his scrutiny drifts down to wear the hand had wrapped itself around her neck, his focused brow softens significantly and his other hand trails down to the skin that has already started to purple.

Clarke flinches away, his hands mirroring the way the walker had held her and he seems to catch on from her reaction.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, so quiet there’s no way that even Murphy could hear him.

She needs to stand herself up, hoping maybe that will help her gain some strength back.

When she leans her weight on to her feet, Clarke collapses almost instantly.

Bellamy holds his hand out, wrapping it under her shoulder so that he can act as a crutch if she needs it.

She refuses to admit that she does, and the fact that he’s here is all Clarke needs to boost herself up, rising to stand on wobbly boots.

She looks down to the walker and in a final moment of weakness, she swings her leg and kicks it as hard as she can in the face, feeling its weakened skull crumble under the force of her foot.

Murphy makes a sound, almost like a choke, and it makes Clarke flit her eyes to him, still with Bellamy’s arm hooked around her back.

The injured man is expressionless, meeting Clarke’s gaze defiantly as he cleans the knife he’s holding clumsily onto his sling.

She watches it, trying to put two and two together.

“Turns out I’m not completely helpless,” he shrugs, wearing a smirk as he twirls the dagger around the fingers of his only good hand.

“Murphy,” she starts but he holds his hand up, silencing her.

“Save it Clarke. I don’t do this sort of thing,”

 _Emotions_ , she thinks. He doesn’t do emotions.

But this isn’t a time for nobility and Clarke barely hesitates before she stalks forward to him, throwing her arms around his shoulders awkwardly considering she almost forgets to be careful of his broken arm.

She breathes out, coolly past his neck and waits for him to give her any sort of response, to shove her away with a scorn for good measure.

He stays unmoving until Clarke thinks this is just how he’s going to take her embrace and she should probably just back away before she makes him feel any more uncomfortable.

That is, until his only good arm starts to shift from his side, and he brings it up to touch the top of her back, holding her to him only slightly.

It’s light, it’s awkward. But Murphy is hugging her back as best he can, and Clarke hides a smile into his fleece.

“Thank you,” she mumbles into the fabric, knowing she’d be done for if it weren’t for him.

“I owed you one,”

She breathes out a laugh, ready to call bullshit.

That might have been what motivated him to stick around a few days ago but not anymore. Not after she’d seen how badly, how subtly he’d wanted to help with Raven.

“Don’t be an idiot, Murphy,”

He gives her one last squeeze, before she breaks away, finally feeling stability return to her feet and her blood pressure return to normal.

“I’ve checked the other rooms, there’s no-one here,” Bellamy says, clearing his throat a little gruffly.

“What are we gonna do with these?” Murphy asks, knocking the body with his foot.

“We’ll figure that out when we’ve found the others,”

He spares Clarke one last glance before he starts to head back down the stairs, but this time there’s something else in his expression. Something almost guilty, and she can’t figure out why.

She’ll ask him when she knows Raven is safe.

 

…

 

The rest of the house is clear, so they figure they should go and find the others before the rain turns to hail.

It’s already blowing gales; when they step outside Clarke regrets having not braided her hair that morning because she is instantly attacked by blonde curls. A yellow tornado that threatens to take off.

There’s a garden outside of the house, overgrown by weeds that leads to a small wooden shed, like it’s been homemade thanks to all of the carvings on the roof.

They head in the opposite direction, back through the front door and Clarke notices a black Chevy parked in the driveway.

Turning around the corner and edging along the picket fence, they head towards the barn only to collide with two slightly distracted brunettes.

Clarke would recognize that ponytail anywhere.

“Shit!” Clarke gasps when she runs into a jacketed shoulder.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” O almost shouts, jumping into the waiting arms of her brother as they hug like there’s nothing else in the world.

“Nope, just me,” Bellamy mumbles into her shoulder while Clarke heads over to Raven, holding each shoulder to check her over, as Raven does the same thing.

“Did you find anything?” Raven asks, pulling away so that they can all regroup.

Murphy snorts, awkwardly stepping forward into the small huddle.

“You could say that,”

“Why, what happened?”

Clarke rolls her eyes at the man with a broken arm, finding the theatrics unnecessary.

“There were two upstairs. Both have been taken care of. What about you guys?”

Octavia shrugs.

“That barn is nasty,” she grimaces, her nose scrunching. “I’m surprised you couldn’t smell it from here.”

She gestures to the house before explaining herself.

“There were a load of dead horses, all rotting away. I don’t know how-“

“Guys, shh,” Raven whispers, holding a hand up to the center of the circle.

They pause, waiting to hear what she so evidently can.

And then there’s a moan, off somewhere in the distance, but close enough for it to be on the property.

Heaving a sigh, Clarke looks to Raven.

“Give me a break,” she groans out, but raises her bow.

They tread over to the front of the house, hoping that they’ll get a better sense of where the noise is coming from from the center of the farm.

They pass by the truck on their way through, crossing on either side of it with Octavia and Murphy on her heels.

She glances through the window to see Raven and make sure they’re okay, but she notices the silhouette that blocks the image of her friends.

The walker is much younger; a man with a blonde beard and blue flannel. It has got both hands on either side of the steering wheel, but there’s a huge dent down the front of its head and a matching one on the face of the wheel.

She hadn’t noticed how close the truck had been placed to the wall.

There’s not even the width of a hair between the bonnet and the eastern side of the house and the headlights have been smashed to pieces, scattering the ground with shards of glass.

The bumper is shot to hell, and the bonnet has been crumpled, popped up in its deformed shape.

The walker has only just noticed them, his face steadily turning to Raven’s side, probably slowed down by the damage done to its head.

Clarke doesn’t hesitate, firing her arrow straight through the open window so that it pierces the back of its skull, protruding as its head smashes forward into the window on the driver’s side.

She hears Raven shriek just a little, a brief yelp before the three of them are running around to that side, silent to listen out for any others.

They’re met with quiet.

Clarke peers in to have a closer look at the truck: the keys are in the ignition.

“I think that’s everywhere checked,” Raven says as she sidles up next to Clarke to explore the truck with her. There’s potential that they might be able to get this thing moving, considering they’ve got a fully functioning engineer with them.

“Can we take this inside?” Clarke hears Octavia ask, a shiver on her lips.

She turns around to answer, remembering that she’s supposed to be looking out for the girl who won’t admit that she’s becoming more and more weakened by illness.

They’re all soaked through, puddles forming in their boots.

Clarke nods, gestures for everyone to lead the way and then drops back to talk to the shaking brunette.

“How are you feeling?” she questions, as quietly as she can through the rain.

Octavia shrugs her off, but she looks as white as a ghost.

When they walk through the door to the cottage, they drift into the living room. There’s an unspoken agreement in the air to leave upstairs alone.

Raven is about to start talking after she drops down on to one of the couches, patterned like it was made in the sixties.

There’s enough room on it to fit three, and there’s another couch perpendicular to it that could fit two more. Next to the grandfather clock sits an armchair, plush and pink and grossly outdated.

Octavia slumps into the armchair the second her eyes land on it.

Clarke barely has time to step into the room before the brunette, with her hair twisted into a frozen braid, throws up all over the itchy fabric of the chair.

The sound she makes sounds way too painful as she vomits up probably everything that she’s eaten in the past twenty-four hours.

Bellamy jumps to her side without hesitation, almost having to wade through the mess his sister has made.

“Shit, O,” he gasps when he catches her face in his hands.

Clarke can’t see his face from the entryway, but she can feel the concern in his words.

“It’s fine, Bell,” Octavia says, wafting her hands in the air almost like she’s in a daze. “It’s just the smell,”

She’s pointing back to the barn.

“Like that’s gonna make it better,” Murphy snarks, pinching his nose into his sling as he stands from the small couch he had dropped himself on to.

Everyone ignores him.

“Octavia, you’re piping hot,” Bellamy says, his voice lowering itself dangerously. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Bellamy,” her words are as stubborn as ever. “I’m fine. I think it’s just a virus,”

She looks to Clarke, who has stepped forward and crouched to where Bellamy is sat, already reaching behind the girl to get her water out of her bag.

“This isn’t nothing, O. Why didn’t you say anything?” he’s becoming mad now, impatient.

Clarke can hear that he’s trying to keep the anger out of his voice, seeing how his sister is barely showing any life behind her eyes, but he’s hurt and it’s clear in his pleading.

“She did,” Clarke huffs, not looking to him as she raises the bottle to Octavia’s lips, gesturing for her to take a few small sips.

She feels Bellamy still. And knows she’s in trouble.

“You knew?” he asks, menacingly.

Clarke doesn’t meet his claim over her gaze, still fretting over O.

“Bellamy,” she starts, not really knowing how to apologize for not telling him.

“Look at the state of her, Clarke,” he cuts her off, swiping a t-shirt he’d taken from his bag impossibly gently over his sister’s face to clean her up. “You didn’t think to let me know?”

Clarke feels the other two shift uncomfortably behind her.

“I only told her last night, she wouldn’t-“

Bellamy stands now, not giving Octavia the chance to finish as he waves his hands around.

“You’ve known for twenty-four hours that she’s felt like this!?”

“I’m not like anything!” O argues back, raising her voice just as loud.

Clarke can only sit where she is and gape, trying to add everything up in a way where she might come out with a viable solution.

“Bellamy, sit down,” she hears Murphy sigh as he lifts himself up to carry himself over to the three of them. Providing a nonchalant barrier.

The man ignores him, still shooting daggers through his eyes.

“She’s my sister, Clarke! I’m supposed to know when she’s in trouble! I’m supposed to be able to trust you,”

His voice would be close to pleading if he weren’t so angry and he shoves forward, knocking into Murphy’s bandaged arm and ignoring the hiss that escapes through his lips.

“Hey, ease off man,” Murphy tries again to no avail.

“Together means shit to you then, Princess. Doesn’t it?”

The chill in the wind barely strikes a match to the coldness in his voice.

It wakes Clarke up, if only for a second.

“No, Bellamy I-“

“I made her promise not to tell you _because_ I knew you would get like this! I only told her in the first place because I didn’t want to become-”

“Because she didn’t want to become like me,” Raven intervenes, standing herself up too so that Clarke is surrounded, still crouched against the armchair, by the four of them.

Everybody, bar one, softens at the rawness of her words. Thinking back to how much Raven had wrecked herself.

“Raven…” Octavia trails off, pleading.

“That is not what this is about.” Bellamy’s voice is firm. He turns on Clarke again. “I thought you knew what she means to me. I talked to you for hours about-”

“Let’s all just calm down,” Murphy cuts him off.

His words have a reverse effect. Because Octavia stomps her foot, boot making carpet sound indestructible.

“Can we all please just get some fucking perspective!?” she looks around the group before she starts again. Clarke doesn’t miss the way she has to grip the arm of the chair for support. “Raven, could you please stop feeling so sorry for yourself? Yes, you fucked up, but we all know you paid the price for it. Clarke, I’m sorry that I asked you to keep this from him,” she softens, gesturing to her body. “but can’t you see why after this shit? Bellamy, will you for once in your life, listen to me? It’s not a big fucking deal. I’m not made of glass. It’s a cold, that I can fight off. Nothing more. And she was just keeping her word to me, so if you’re going to start talking shit about trust then-”

Suddenly the smell of Octavia’s half-digested stomach contents becomes too much, and despite the broken window, the room becomes way too hot.

“I can’t do this,” Clarke stammers out, almost falling over her own feet as she stumbles out of the room and feels her way through the halls to get some air.

“Way to run away, Princess,” she hears mumbled before she breaks out into the kitchen.

There’s a basin underneath a large window, adorned by a huge house plant that has fallen limp, dead.

She grasps at the ceramic and spins the tap, but nothing comes out of it.

Figures that this place would be cut off.

She hears someone having a coughing fit from the other room, and she can’t stand the sounds of Octavia spluttering no matter how trapped she feels.

She takes a slow breath in, waits a few seconds to exhale and watches it float away to the tiled ceiling.

Then, she schools her face and stalks back into the living room that could barely fit six people standing up.

Octavia is laid down on the larger couch, another one of Bellamy’s t-shirts dripping wet on to her forehead.

Bellamy and Raven aren’t here, and neither is the armchair that caught most of O’s vomit. They must be ditching it now.

Murphy is sat, facing an empty fireplace as he twirls his dagger in his hand.

“We’re going to start a fire,” he says, nodding over to where Octavia is still shaking.

Clarke drops down to her side, takes Octavia’s temperature then proceeds to patiently feed her from her water canteen.

“I’m fine, Clarke,” the girl complains, shoving the bottle away.

Clarke just shushes her, then strokes her forehead in the way that her father used to do for her, tracing small circles into O’s temples and watching as the tension slowly starts to seep out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'So come on love, draw your swords,'  
> \- Draw Your Swords, Angus & Julia Stone


	9. Drink up baby, look at the stars

Octavia refuses to be the only one to sleep on the largest couch by dragging Raven almost on to her lap before she tucks herself in for the night.

The small amount of insulation the cottage provides and the fire they’ve managed to keep going seems to be giving her some rest-bite.

Her fever doesn’t appear to be quite so severe, and she hasn’t yet thrown up the small bit of dried fruit that they’d managed to scavenge from the massacred kitchen.

Raven and Clarke take the other sofa because every time they try to offer it up to either of the guys, both just wave them away with nothing but an emotionless grunt.

They top and tail, because fighting over who should claim it could go on all night and they’re way too tired for that.

Bellamy hasn’t so much as glanced in Clarke’s direction all night long, instead choosing to throw his weight around in a petulant strop.

She has no idea what to say to him, still undecided if she is even in the wrong here.

His words dance around in her mind while she’s meant to be sleeping and she can tell that, although he’s seething with her, he’s also incredibly mad at himself.

He feels guilty because he didn’t see Octavia’s warning signs himself, and because he wasn’t the first person she’d gone to when she needed someone else.

And as much as he wants to put that on anyone but himself, Clarke can see straight through his blank expressions and the rigidly folded arms that act as armor across his chest.

He aimed low when he went for her though, and if he thinks for a second that she’s going to hold her hands out and wait for him to come running back into her open arms then he’s lying to himself.

Him and Murphy are taking watch, outside the room so that if they get caught out, they aren’t completely trapped.

Raven had said something about getting rid of the walkers at some point tomorrow before she’d nodded off.

You never know if someone is going to be a snorer; someone as effortlessly elegant as Raven would never be suspected of the habit. But here she lies, with sounds mimicking those of an engine motor erupting from her nose.

Clarke doesn’t get much sleep, plagued by the thought that she’s gotten herself into something that she has no idea how to get out of.

 

…

 

“I’m gonna set up a way to collect the rainwater today,” Bellamy says, mostly to his sister the next morning.

Octavia has propped herself up against some cushions with homemade crocheted cases, British bulldogs etched on in color.

She still looks grossly pale, but Bellamy has given her a plastic mixing bowl that he’d found in the kitchen, just in case her insides decide to show themselves again.

“What do you need?” Raven asks casually, rubbing her eyes having just woken up.

He shrugs, obviously not clear on what sort of ground he’s on with her.

“I can make do with what I find,”

Murphy comes waddling in, carrying in a couple logs of firewood under his arm.

Clarke gets up to help him. She takes them out of his hand and chucks each one on to the steadily dying fire, looking to anywhere but the center of the room.

“We need to get rid of the bodies,” she says into the flames, her eyes catching on each snap of cremated wood. “I’m not going to let that smell become normal.”

“I’d give you a hand, but I want to get started on the truck,”

Clarke turns around to lean her back into the fireplace. She notices that she’s wearing Bellamy’s still damp fleece and now that they’re inside, there isn’t really an excuse not to take it off.

She sheds it and hangs it over the broken lamp in the corner of the room.

Everyone apart from Clarke is looking to Raven curiously.

“You think you can salvage that?” Murphy asks, almost laughing at the thought. “That truck hit the house hard enough to dent the wall,”

“I’ve seen worse,” she shrugs, clearly already planning what she’s going to do.

Octavia chirps up, illness be damned.

“You know if we fix that thing, we’ll get to Vancouver in days?” her voice is so hopeful that it hurts.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Murphy snarks.

“The roads are clogged,” Clarke responds, trying to intervene with some logic. “It might help us get to the edge of Vancouver _if_ we take the long way around. We’d have to make it on foot from there.”

“It would still buy us time,” Bellamy thinks, all recognition drawn out of his voice.

“I never said it wouldn’t,” she says, just as cold as she shoves past his shoulder to get to Octavia, lifting a fur throw over her body as the breeze through the broken window picks up again. “I’m just saying, we’ve still got a long way to go.”

“I’ll fix the window,” O cuts in, clearing her throat awkwardly. “It’s the least I could do.”

“Clarke, those bodies are a two-man job. I’ll help you get them out of the house,”

“Murphy take watch. Someone needs to stay with O,”

“I’m fine, Clarke. I don’t need babysitting.”

She’s scowling but there’s a fondness somewhere in that.

“Come on Hawkeye, let’s get this over with,”

Murphy says it just as casually as he says everything else but memories of teaching Octavia to shoot flood back as though it was years ago.

Bellamy seems to have no reaction to the nickname, but that doesn’t stop Clarke from claiming his gaze. She can’t read whatever he’s thinking about, yet she hopes with everything, that he’s remembering sheared dandelions and open apologies.

She lifts herself up, dropping Bellamy’s glance and brushes her pant legs off to disregard her slip-up.

 

…

 

She has no idea how Murphy expects to help out with the task until he intervenes after watching her struggle to grasp the shoulders of the dead man for fifteen minutes.

He practically shoves her out of the way, gestures to both of his functioning feet, then kicks the sides of the dead walker until it is teetering on the edge of the staircase.

“Really? This is your master plan?” Clarke smirks.

“So quick to scold, Griffin,” he chides before he gives the body one last swift kick and they watch as it thuds its way down the stairs, each slam of its head echoing through the cottage.

“What the fuck are you two doing?” Octavia’s voice rings almost as loudly.

Murphy throws Clarke a wink before he answers: “Our jobs,”

“My head already feels like it’s melting- couldn’t think of a way to do that without causing an earthquake?”

Raven’s snickers ring throughout the whole house.

They jog down to the landing together and Murphy hooks his arm around the man’s neck while Clarke holds on to both ankles.

It’s clumsy and takes twice as long as it should do, but Clarke weirdly finds that she’s actually having fun.

They carry him out, all the way to the barn so that the small of the dead horses masks the stench of the walker’s rotting flesh.

Dumping it is an unceremonious affair, and Clarke has to wipe the sweat from her brow by the time they’ve carried the old woman down too.

Once they’ve done the job, they head back into the living room to check on Octavia.

She must’ve found some duct tape from somewhere because there are strips of silver blocking the breeze from flowing into the decidedly much homier room.

She’s sound asleep again so they silently agree to let her rest.

Finding they have some empty time on their hands while Raven works relentlessly at the totaled truck, and Bellamy constructs some sort of miniature water slide to collect the rain, they agree to have a hunt around the circumference of the farm, Murphy muttering something about tagging along for morale.

They tuck their pants into their boots and zip up each layer of waterproof before they head out into the oncoming storm. Clarke is glad she has a reason to put Bellamy’s fleece back over her shoulders.

He brings the radio with him, playing with the dials in a way that makes him look like he’s at peace.

Clarke thinks back to his story, how that was all he had for weeks.

“You know, for someone who acts like he doesn’t give a fuck about anything, you seem to care an awful lot,” she sighs as they inch across the tree line.

He bristles, clutching at the radio ever so slightly.

They’re walking slowly through the woods, listening out for movements.

“Leave it, Clarke,” he grimaces.

She opens her mouth to say something else but he raises his hand.

“I’m not Bellamy. I’m not just going to pour my heart out to you because you smile at me,”

She doesn’t know what he’s trying to say, and any reply she can fathom is halted by the scurrying of the squirrel in the leaves above them. Clarke shoots it down without delay, giving herself enough time to order her thoughts and compose herself.

“You have a heart?” she gasps, clutching at her cheek in mock surprise.

“Cute,” he smirks in a way that would be malicious if she weren’t so used to it by now.

 

…

 

Murphy snatches the squirrel from her hands when they break through the clearing to the farm, shoving her arrow back into its quiver as he mumbles something about skinning it.

He heads in the direction of the truck wordlessly. Clarke says nothing, but after he leaves, she can’t help but smile fondly at the way he’s drifting towards Raven as though they’re magnetized.

She swings open the front door and closes it just as quickly, shaking out the water from her once again dripping wet hair when she hears heated voices erupting from the living room.

She peers to listen, leaning into the doorway only to catch sight of Bellamy’s boots stretched out to the fire.

“That doesn’t mean I should be sorry, Bell,” Octavia’s weakened voice drifts across the fire, which is being allowed to roar now that there is no wind to limit it.

“O, this could have gotten a lot more serious _just_ because you were too stubborn to let me help you,”

“And you’ve just fucked everything up with Clarke because _you_ are too stubborn to admit that we’ve accepted them into our lives. For good,”

“Keeping this from me was as good as lying to me. I am allowed to be hurt by this.”

“Then take it out on me, Bellamy. Do not take it out on Clarke.”

“I’m meant to be able to trust her,” he breathes after a long pause. Broken. And in return, it breaks Clarke.

“Then trust her,” Octavia pleads, her voice crackling over the sickness.

“I can’t,”

“Why not?”

There is silence. It’s painfully delicate. That is, until Octavia breathes a humorless laugh.

“See? You can’t think of one valid reason,”

His reply is instantaneous.

“You’re my priority. When someone risks your life, I can’t…”

“Bellamy stop being such a goddamn idiot. I asked her for some advice. It’s not like she held a knife to my throat,”

Another pause. Another moment. Left for the fire to pop and crackle. He doesn’t say anything.

“You’re hurt because I didn’t tell you and I get that. You’re upset because I went to someone else and begged her to keep quiet. Don’t ruin what you two might have,”

She says it so quietly, so hushed that Clarke nearly misses it.

She doesn’t miss how he echoes the words, just as soft.

“What we might have?”

Clarke doesn’t want to hear where this is going. This isn’t a conversation that she should be listening to.

“Come on, Bell. I’ve seen the way you look-”

“The bodies are gone,” Clarke all but yells as she throws herself into the room clumsily.

Refusing to look at Bellamy, she can still see how red his face has turned, practically radiating heat from the tips of his ears.

Octavia looks stunned when she sees Clarke enter the room, mouth opening and closing like a goldfish as she lifts herself upright.

Clarke needs to talk to Bellamy. She’s too tired of everything to be at odds with him for much longer. She wants her friend back.

“I thought I might go and try to find some tea,” she continues, clearing her throat awkwardly and looking to anywhere but him. “It could help with your throat and…”

Clarke trails off, not really sure what else she’s trying to say.

She looks to Octavia, who has her eyebrows raised pointedly towards her brother.

Bellamy clears his throat before he mutters something unintelligible.

Clarke asks him to repeat whatever it was that he’d said as politely as she can.

“I can come and help you, only if you want,” he stammers.

O looks content with his offer, pausing only briefly to fight her way through another coughing fit before she smiles smoothly at them both.

“I could use the help,” Clarke shrugs, trying to steady her voice as much as she can.

He follows her silently into the kitchen, toes tapping the tiles in time with hers.

They don’t speak until she reaches a counter and crouches down to open one of the cupboards.

“How’s Raven getting on with the truck?” he asks.

She can picture him stretching to scratch at his neck from behind her.

“She’ll get there,” Clarke answers, picking her way through some moldering jam jars.

He doesn’t say anything, still stood behind her.

“And the radio?”

He hasn’t had much contact time with the radio, having made it pretty clear that he doesn’t see much point in trying to fix it. He’d been adamant that they were making it just fine on their own.

“We’re trying our best,”

She closes her eyes, squeezing them tight to shove away the exhaustion. Once she’s given herself a moment to breathe, she swings the cupboard door shut and stands to face him.

He’s standing closer to the counter than she realized, and there’s barely an inch between the two of them.

Now that he’s looking into her eyes, she can get a clean read for the first time. They are brimming over with unspoken words. Clarke doesn’t know what: Confessions? Apologies? Promises?

“Clarke…” he begins, voice already bleeding out.

“Bellamy,” she stops him, her own barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. I do… I understand how much she matters to you,”

He looks like he’s actually in pain.

“No, Clarke, I shouldn’t have acted how I did last night. I just, I already felt so helpless after that walker…”

He trails off and Clarke wants to hit him in the face because he’s starting to close himself off again.

No. Not this time. She decides to take the risk.

“What Bell? Talk to me,” she whispers, reaching to place her hand on his neck. It’s burning hot against her icy fingers. His skin is lined with a thin sheen of sweat.

He doesn’t pull away from whatever she’s doing, just stands like a statue and watches her every move.

“You can, you know? You can talk to me,”

She’s practically begging when she squeezes his neck as though it might pull a reaction from him.

She can see the second he caves. The hard glossiness of his eyes dissipating back into that warm honey.

“When that thing jumped on you, I froze. It was all happening so fast and I felt so far from you and all I could think was that I’d lost you… I just don’t think I can do that, Clarke,”

“Do what?”

“Lose you,”

She doesn’t say anything, too shell-shocked with his raw honesty.

“And then Octavia looked like death warmed up and it hit me in the face that I could have been this close to losing her too…”

He takes an impossibly shaky breath, slumping his shoulders as the relief of having let her in washes over him.

“And it got too much,”

Clarke’s eyes are threatening to spill over, but she needs to stay strong. For him. That doesn’t stop the hushed “Bellamy,” from escaping her lips.

“I’m sorry for what I said. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Now that he has opened up, Clarke can see everything. She’s still got her hand over his neck, rubbing small circles down the tight ligaments to ease him.

He has drifted impossibly closer, leg brushing hers as he braces himself with one arm on the counter behind her.

“Bellamy, if you need forgiveness then I’ll give that to you, okay? You’re forgiven. But what you said to me in Nebraska, about how we need to be fighters? You were right. We need to stay strong; we need to be soldiers.”

Clarke has been trying so, so hard not to say something to anyone about the future. She could never bring herself to promise any kind of security. But she needs him to have this, even if it is just a shred of the certainty he wants.

“We can pick up the pieces once we get to Vancouver,”

Every word feels like a lie.

And they stand where they are, drifting no closer towards each other and no further away. Just still, unmoving, perfectly content with the steadily dimming kitchen, sheltering each other from the storm that is only growing outside.

 

…

 

Clarke breaks the intimacy countless minutes later, when the rain turns into hail and the gales threaten to smash down the window.

Both separating reluctantly, they start to move towards the living room. But something has stilled between the two of them and Clarke grasps on to it with both hands.

Their journey takes strangely long, longer than it’d normally take if they weren’t walking side by side, hands hanging limp.

Bellamy has physically relaxed, his shoulders slumped, and the firm bite of his jaw gone.

There’s no doubt in Clarke’s mind anymore: they’re a team. And the only way that they’re going to get their families _and_ themselves through this, is together.

If the heart to heart hadn’t thrown her off, the picture Clarke sees as she walks into the living room really does knock her down for the count.

Octavia is still shrouded in blankets, but she’s fully propped up against the arm of the three-seater and has made room for Murphy to sit opposite her.

They’ve both got their legs crossed, like kids at school wearing shameless grins.

And to top it all off, Octavia has her hands bent forward, clasped together like she’s praying, and Murphy is mirroring her, except he’s only using one hand. But he’s reaching out eagerly, and each time Octavia swipes her hands away, like she’s teasing him.

Slaps. They’re playing slaps.

Raven is stood off to the side, watching curiously as she dries off by the fire. Clarke can’t see a single piece of her friend that hasn’t been soaked through.

The expression she’s wearing as she observes the game is intense, almost unreadable. Clarke wants to drag her away and interrogate her until she owns up to whatever she is thinking.

There’s a fondness there. But she’s questioning it at the same time, brow furrowed like she can’t be sure of anything.

None of them look up when Clarke and Bellamy step further into the room, so entranced in the seemingly endless competition.

Clarke just shrugs cluelessly at Bellamy and gestures for him to follow her over to the other couch. The smaller one; only fit for two people.

He sits down beside her wordless. Clarke doesn’t flinch when his palm falls to rest on to the top of her hand.

There’s barely enough room to sit next to one another so he’s probably just trying to make space to spread out further.

And the twitch of his pinky finger against hers means nothing. It’s just cold.

Too distracted to pay any sort of attention to the game, Clarke doesn’t really notice when they decide that Octavia has won.

She does notice when Raven catches her eye and smiles. Pure.

“Uh oh, Mom and Dad are back,” she sighs, rolling her eyes before she slumps down against the fireplace, undoing her ponytail so she can let her hair dry.

“Well, that’s new,” Bellamy smirks, bumping Clarke’s shoulder.

“We need to talk game plan,” Clarke clears her throat, trying to redirect the conversation to something that won’t make her blush like a fool.

“Sure,” Octavia shrugs as she kicks back, smug.

“I vote we stay here for as long as we need,” Raven says as she pokes the fire. “I need more time on the truck. I can get it done; I know it. And we all know we aren’t going to find a place better than this.”

They take a minute to absorb what she says before Clarke counters her, just so she can cover all of their bases.

“Would it be worth it, though? We don’t know how long it’ll take to fix that thing. If we take the delay now, it’s not gonna be just a couple of days, it’s going to be weeks before we make it,”

“How so?” Murphy asks.

“You really want to set out mid-December as we are, to keep heading north?”

He nods his head, conceding her point.

“So we need to decide if we’re going to commit to this place or not,”

“We aren’t in a position to head out now,” Bellamy nods over to his sister subtly, shooting Clarke an unapologetic glance hurriedly after.

“That storm hasn’t even started yet,” Raven mutters as she tries to look out of the taped-up window.

“Then we have to wait it out,”

“It’s not like we haven’t made this place homey,”

Clarke is about to comment again, but the thought dies on her lips when she feels Bellamy shift backwards. And he takes the hand that had been resting on top of hers, swinging it so his arm lands on the back of the sofa, perfectly around her even if there is some space between his skin and hers.

There’s a silence. She wonders if the other have noticed what he’s done. She wonders if he even realizes what he’s done.

But she also wonders why the hell he’s doing what he’s doing, because as much as this feels like something unspoken, his ease with his new position convinces her that he is unaffected.

Of course he is.

Of course she’s just thinking way too much about something that has no relevance whatsoever.

He’s not even touching her for fuck’s sake.

“This is the safest we’re going to get,” he hums, breaking her free from her inward spiral.

“No, Vancouver is the safest place we’re going to get,” Octavia tells him.

“That’s only if we make it there though,”

His words freeze the room.

“Then we stay,” Clarke decides when the silence becomes too much.

And no-one disagrees with her.

 

…

 

Bellamy and Clarke manage to find some peppermint tea a while later, smiles gracing their lips when he finishes boiling some water on the fire they have.

The mugs that they scavenge are adorned with dachshunds and ginger cats with twisted grins.

And Clarke kisses him.

He’d found a mostly empty jar of honey on the highest shelf and Clarke is unable to resist it.

She’d laced each roaring mug with a teaspoon of the crystallized gel and after she’d reached to close the jar, he had snatched the spoon out of her unsuspecting fingers.

He plunges it into his mouth and laps up the syrup from the part of the spoon that makes his face look like not his face.

And he watches her the whole time as the spoon hangs from his lips.

She closes the jar with a sharp twist of the gingham lid to try to shake the image of his blown pupils out of her head.

And then she turns around, swiping the spoon from his lips before she can stop herself. She lifts it up to her face and lets the sheen of his spit reflect light away from the remnants of honey.

Then she licks it, and she can’t even taste the sweetness of the syrup. She was right, his taste is like fire. He must’ve been a smoker before.

And she wants more.

He’s looking into her eyes, gaze dark as she sucks on it. Lips smacking.

Clarke feels a warmth deep in the pit of her stomach, and she wants to know what he tastes like without the cold sheen of metal.

She decides she’s going to kill him when he raises his hand, steps impossibly closer, and traces his finger along the outskirts of her lips. His thumb lands on something sticky, but the circle he makes around her mouth is unhalted.

The tacky trail that he has left is like some kind of trap, luring things in only for them to get stuck to her.

Bellamy’s finger rests at the corner of her lips. His eyes are a challenge.

And his head, it drops just that bit towards her own, just for a moment before he has taken his finger back and touches it to the same place on his mouth.

Clarke wants to know if the residual sweetness that he is lapping up tastes of anything else. If it makes him hunger for anything other than food.

When they carry the mugs into the living room, Clarke’s hand is shaking. But she’s not cold.

 

…

 

The storm really kicks in during Clarke’s watch.

The first clap of thunder makes the entire room shake, stirring everyone to some extent.

She’s always been a fan of rain like this: the kind that you feel all the way to your veins.

She can tell that Raven is awake through the little tells that only she knows, like how her eyelids aren’t fluttering about painfully with the nightmares.

So, Clarke stands herself up, drops a hand to squeeze protectively at Octavia’s shoulder as she passes and leaves the room on tiptoes.

She wants to see this in all of its glory.

Treading up the stairs with caution, and avoiding the creakiest floorboards, she makes her way over to the first bedroom on the landing.

It’s the bedroom that held the walkers, so Clarke didn’t really get to look around.

It’s a perfectly normal room, with a narrow double bed but it doesn’t have what she’s looking for.

It has been an unspoken agreement that they won’t take the beds in the house- it would feel too much like an infringement, a violation. They want to leave that last shred of dignity to whoever owned this house before.

She moves towards the next bedroom, which appears to be a brick for brick remake of the other.

It still doesn’t have what she’d noticed from the outside of the cottage during their hunt earlier.

She finds it in the main bathroom on that floor, stricken useless with the lack of running water.

The window is glazed over but it is large enough to lean across comfortably. There is a latch on one of the vertical panes that allows the window to open inwardly. It’s so high up that it cuts into the roof at an angle, which means there is a slight tiled overhang.

Clarke opens it slowly, before she lifts herself up, to swing her legs over the windowsill. Leaning on each of her hands, she kicks her ankles out.

The thunder has already torn up the sky, and with the window open she can hear it so loud her whole body shakes.

She counts the moments between each clap. They’re only getting closer together, like they are reaching out towards one another. Secretly, Clarke wants them to meet, just to see what might happen when they do.

The lightning strikes golden through darkened clouds, and it looks tangible, more valuable than the twenty-two-carat wedding wing her mother used to wear.

A noise sounds behind her but Clarke ignores it, hypnotized by the chaos in the night sky.

He clears his throat again, louder this time.

“Room for one more?” Bellamy asks quietly, hovering behind her.

Clarke shuffles to the side, pushing herself into the plastic windowpane so that he can squeeze in next to her.

It’s maybe too awkward when he tries to climb through, all long legs and broad shoulders, teetering on the edge of the sill.

The overhang stops their heads from getting wet, which helps because Clarke needs some rest-bite from being sodden wet. She wants to let the warmth from his fleece and his body shelter her from the storm, and actually have an effect for tonight.

He might say something to her, but his voice is nothing compared to the thunder.

She leans her shoulder to his, mostly because it’s exhausting having to lean on the sharp ridge of the windowpane.

He leans into her too, probably for the same reason.

The clouds are getting more and more ready to descend upon them, so dark she can’t distinguish them from the sky.

“Can’t sleep?” she asks him, eyes not leaving the shadows.

She feels him shrug against her shoulder.

“I guess not,”

Voice light, seeping ease.

“How come?” she wonders.

“Just… thinking,”

“About?”

He takes his time; all the time she wishes she could give.

“Everything,” he whispers, still soft and light despite how heavy the clouds look.

The hail is already beating down, swirling around in a cyclone, hiding stars from wherever they are watching. Like each one is being protected by stellar nursery guardians, sheltered.

“Talk to me about the stars, Bell,” she mumbles out to the decaying farmland.

He’s quiet for so long that she assumes he has missed it. And that’s okay because she’s perfectly content with this, whatever it is.

He clears his throat, sounding strong as he rallies.

“Why?”

“Because you’re the only one who knows their secrets,” she answers honestly, unable to think of any other reason.

She still hasn’t looked at him. She’s self-aware enough to know her own kryptonite.

“You’ve heard of Atticus?”

“Finch?”

“Not quite,”

“Oh,” she stumbles, trying to flick through her glimpses of trivia. “Yeah, sure.”

He sees straight through her, breathing heavily in amusement.

“He was a poet,” he tells her, bumping her shoulder.

He’ll tell her something. He’ll lullaby his way through her mind. She’s happy for him to go at his own pace.

When she still hasn’t looked at him, he knocks his hand against her hip, fingers brushing over layers and layers to get her to turn.

Clarke smiles, taking it away just as quickly, then swivels her neck.

Her hair is raging after waking up, curls falling every this way and that. His eyes are heavy, darkened underneath in a way she thinks won’t ever go away.

Why do his lips look so much more inviting tonight? Is it the burning hot sugar that he drank only hours ago?

He opens his mouth, breathing in sharply, alerting Clarke to the fact that she’s staring.

Has his voice always been this facile? This nimble?

_“’I swear it to the stars,’_

_He said._

_And she smiled,”_

Clarke closes her eyes. Relishing.

_“’Swear it to the dust instead_

_For one day, those stars will all be dust,_

_And so will we_

_But this,’ she kissed._

_‘If it is true_

_Will live in forever_

_In those dusty skies.’”_

He’s pointing, raised arm to the tips of the sky.

She follows the finger that traces angry bolts of fleeting lightning as they flash in all places. Every place. Bright white like there is a camera somewhere in the background, immortalizing this humbled moment.

“It’s beautiful,” she wonders, faint gasp behind her memory.

She’ll be reliving those words for as long as she can keep them in her back pocket.

“I think so,” he shrugs, speaking feathers.

Unable to meet the rampant claim he’s trying to take over her eyes, Clarke considers.

“You should still write,”

“What?” he asks, surprise so sincere he might just fall out of the window.

She won’t try to convince him, being probably the least accustomed to his own work than the others. But she can taste the potential on his breath and refuses to lose it.

“I know it can’t happen now… but we agreed we wouldn’t lose our humanity, maybe writing is your way to keep it,”

“And what would I even write about?”

His tone is light, humoring her, but she can hear the pleading voice coming from somewhere, laced with all the hope he can afford.

She notices he’s not really said anything at all about what he likes to write about, always having  favored stories from other people’s mouths.

“I was never any good,” he carries on, practically reading her mind. “I never found my muse in time. Anyway, we’ve had this conversation Princess. You need life experience,”

Clarke snorts, ugly.

“Yeah, well you’ve got plenty of that,” she answers, gesturing all the way around because she can’t quite pick a place that resembles everything that they’ve been through.

“Too bad I don’t have a pen,”

He waves a hand, dismissing her but moments later he is glancing over, tentative and curious.

“What would I write about?” he whispers again, softer than anything.

“So, Clarke has to think of everything,” she jokes back, rolling her eyes to brush away the tension hanging thick in the air.

His eyes sparkle when the next shot of lightning rumbles through to answer the drums in the sky.

“Okay, let me start you off,” she muses.

He waits.

“There’s a princess in a tower,”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, hair down to her ankles and green eyes-”

“Like seaweed?” he asks, nose scrunching up distastefully.

“Like emeralds,” she clarifies as though it’s obvious. “And she’s trapped in the tower surrounded by men with grey skin,

All filtered out like a black and white movie,” she continues, picturing each freeze frame.

“Color all gone?” he wonders, disbelieving.

“Except for her eyes,”

He takes a moment, considering her proposal while the clouds start to gather straight over their heads.

“Okay, this has promise,”

Bellamy turns to look at her, like he’s waiting for her to go on, a half smile lining his face.

Instead Clarke slaps her hand to his shoulder and smiles almost apologetically.

“Don’t let me down on this one, Blake,”

He breathes a laugh, dropping his head to the hands resting in his lap.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he mumbles, almost cut off by the oncoming winds.

She laughs too, and turns back to look outside, never growing tired of watching the war.

And then they lapse into a silence as easy as swinging her legs over the ledge.

It must last hours, enough for footsteps to be heard throughout the house, letting them know that the others are awake.

The only place where she feels him touch her is at her leg with his own, but that’s through necessity because of the plastic, creaking under both of their weights, not being wide enough to space themselves apart comfortably.

He makes the occasional crack, joking about something that inevitably makes her leap into a story of her past while she pokes him for his own, which he returns just as eagerly.

She learns that his middle name is the letter ‘R’ because he never found his birth certificate and gave up trying to figure it out, his father having been the one to finish signing it off without his mother’s knowledge.

She follows by listing every single name beginning with R before she makes him choose his favorite.

They have another argument about the Beatles and the Stones, which is a discussion Clarke knew would have had to come up eventually.

It consists of throwing ceaseless song titles at each other, each time thinking they’ve gotten one over on their opponent.

And her favorite point in the night is when he gives her a song she has never even heard of.

“Please,” she smirks, throwing her head back.

She has definitely won this one now.

“That’s low even for you, Bellamy. You’re even making songs up now?”

He gives her a look, eyes crinkling, and he sits like he’s waiting for her to give some joke up.

Another moment. Another question hanging in the air. Another glass of water, just about to topple over.

It sinks in that she’s being serious when his brow starts to knit together, sewing patches of confusion.

“I’m not making it up?”

“Sure, Bell,” she says condescendingly, looking to rile him up for her own amusement.

“Well look at that,” he smirks as he reels back to rest on the wall, confidence transparent. “You don’t know it.”

She rolls her eyes.

“I can’t know every single Beatles song there is to know, Bellamy,”

“And isn’t ignorance bliss?” he finishes, smiling wider than a Cheshire cat.

“Fine then. If this is your smoking gun then you better hope it’s worth it,” she smiles back, readily gesturing for him to prove himself.

Watching her for as long as it takes him to figure out what she expects him to do, his eyes narrow and he leans forward to rise to her challenge.

Clarke mirrors his movement, her head tilting forward just enough to tell him that she isn’t going to back down easily.

He has his lips clamped together, a slight grimace gracing his expression as though he is preparing himself for something, eyes calculating.

It’d be so easy to lean forward that tiny bit more. Impossibly easy. Inevitably easy.

And her feet are still swinging at an angle to her body as they slip down from the soaking wet wall.

Another lightning strike. Another roar of something in the sky. And he’s only drifting closer, and she’s only falling into him.

Unaffordable promises be damned. She can put her duties on hold. Just for tonight she can let herself be young and naïve again.

And now he’s watching her mouth, wearing an unreadable expression that she can’t decipher before something clicks in her head.

Because there’s no time for naivety, and he knows that more than anything. He doesn’t want this.

He’s shown no signs of wanting this. Hell, she doesn’t even know if _she_ wants this.

He had his pick of any girl he wanted in the days before, and now he doesn’t want that.

She’s losing her head, and she needs to keep a hold of it.

She’s about to fall back to the wall, to look back to the picture that she would kill to paint. But his face breezes past her chin the second she tries to move.

He leans into her as his stubble brushes its way against her cheek, her cheek blown warm thanks to whatever he thinks he is doing.

And then the thunder tears through the skies again but this time it doesn’t stop after a few seconds.

Instead, it changes and turns its way through a labyrinth of pitches that Clarke has never heard before.

He’s humming his way through her soul, jumpy and offkey and beautiful in the way that Bellamy Blake has always been. And how he will be for as long as she’ll know him until the day comes where something happens that cuts the blood from her brain and they lose each other.

She already knows how much that day is going to hurt.

If she lets herself even hope to do what her lips are tingling in anticipation for, then that day is going to hurt a hundred times more.

So while he sings to her, wordless hums crossing the single centimeter between his mouth and the shell of her pinkened ear.

She regrets never having heard the song. But she regrets never having met whoever the man before her is in an era where she had the time to get her heartbroken.

Because this song, and this storm, and those eyes could have done it a thousand times over.

It is minutes long. He must have performed this whole thing before he leans back and slumps his head heavily against the wall. Content.

She looks straight into his eyes and opens her mouth to say _anything_ in reply but comes up empty and ends up looking like a lost goldfish.

And he sees straight through her, the same as ever.

“Gotcha,”

Maybe she has lost. Maybe he looks more smug than he ever has. And maybe she has kicked herself back into submission to admit that whatever she had felt for just a moment will forever be a pipe dream.

But this storm won’t last forever, and she’ll let it fall while she still can.

 

…

 

To say the sun rises in the early hours would be a lie, because the sun never quite appears through the storm. The dark clouds make the sky stay in night, so dawn only happens beneath them.

Frosted dew forming across the acres of farmland, the escaping light crawling its way across the ground.

They’re sat in sated silence, still watching through the window like a movie, when Clarke gets dragged out to sea by the tidal waves in her head.

She knows she can’t have him, that he doesn’t want this and even if he did, she couldn’t allow it.

So it takes the night to get it through her head that she can’t act on whatever she wants to feel, that they are just friends, if she can even accept that right now.

When she pulls away from their moment, exiting the window like she’s just fallen out of a portrait frame, she is decidedly rattled.

Agreeing that another mug of tea and some space from Bellamy are going to be the only things to cool her down, she walks away.

He doesn’t say anything. She doubts he’s even noticed because he doesn’t take his eyes away from the outskirts of the storm.

Somebody is awake, she heard the pattering of footsteps an hour ago, but she doesn’t want to talk to anybody right now.

Raven is in the kitchen, her own mug clasped in her hands as she looks out.

She’s thinking about something, intense and confusing so it must be something more emotional because she’s never struggled with logical problems.

Like that truck, for example, which Clarke knows she’s already got ordered blueprints at the front of her mind for.

Whatever she’s worried about is going to be something deep in the back of her head, something she’s trying to shove beneath those stacks and stacks of blueprints.

“Hey,” Raven says when Clarke tries to sneak past.

“Hey,”

They’re quiet while Clarke sets about making her own tea with half of the boiling water they’ve got left.

There is still a furrow in the crease of her forehead, so Clarke drops the dainty teaspoon down heavily, letting the sigh escape before she turns.

“How are you feeling now?” she asks with patience she doesn’t have.

“I’m not broken, Clarke,”

 _Broken._ Raven definitely isn’t broken, but Clarke on the other hand feels like her skin has been lined with needles and it’s only a matter of seconds before they start to dig their way in.

It hurts, knowing that she’s about to suffer, and it’s hard to restrain the tears after she starts to feel that.

“And I’m allowed to check on my friend,”

There’s a hand on her shoulder, light without drowning.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

She puts a hand on her forehead, bracing herself as though it might push the emotions away.

“Nothing, I’m cool,” she shrugs, hand still holding her head up.

Raven doesn’t look impressed as she purses her lips in waiting.

“Clarke,” she warns.

Clarke picks up the mug that she’s holding and uses it as a lever, launching herself up from the counter.

“I’m tired, Raven. Okay? I’m just so tired. I feel like…”

“Like?”

She’ll give in, if it gives her at least a foot of space.

“Like I’m living a life that isn’t worth it,”

“What are you talking about?” Raven asks, following her as she breaches the kitchen doorway, and no matter how surprised she looks, something dawns on her expression. “Is this about Bellamy?”

Is that all it takes? Just a look to know that she’s been caught.

“What!?” she demands.

Raven takes a minute, approaching her again, stone-faced. Her eyes whimper when she places her hands over Clarke’s shoulders.

“Clarke there is nothing stopping you two from-”

“Raven, whatever you’re about to say, just don’t,”

Her own voice is a warning.

“Clarke-”

“Raven.”

A beat. Another one. Both rising to the challenge that the other one is proposing.

“I am trapped,” Clarke whispers, breath a cloud. “I miss the freedom of choosing if I can get my heart broken.”

“Are you saying you want to get your heart broken?”

“No,” she says firm. It only takes a minute to scatter doubt in her own words. “Yes. I don’t know,”

She shoves past Raven, picking up her bow from the kitchen table and slinging the caddy of arrows across her shoulder.

“I’m acting like a fucking child,” she admits, quietly so as not to wake anyone else up. “I need to shoot something.”

“Clarke, wait,” Raven calls, no regard for her own noise levels.

“No, I need space,”

“I’m not letting you run away from this,” she shouts as they cross the hallway and as Clarke reaches for the doorknob.

The living room door swings open, to reveal a brunette who looks shrunken with sickness.

“Run away from what?”

“Go back to bed O,” Clarke braces, suddenly feeling like she’s under attack. Only this time, she can’t just shoot her way out of it.

“Where are you going?”

O gestures to Clarke’s laced boots and the fleece she has shoved over her shoulders. Her own fleece.

“To get some air, Jesus Christ! Am I going to be chained to the fucking wall now?”

Raven cuts in, stepping even closer despite Clarke’s raised palm.

“Clarke we’re just-”

“No, Raven. You are not trying to help me. You’re trying to fix me like I’m a kicked puppy. You and Wells always wanted me to stop acting like a heartless bitch, well here it is. You happy now?”

“Clarke-”

“What’s going on?” Murphy’s voice sounds from the living room, decidedly done.

“I’m still a human being,” she says, low as she looks into Raven’s frenzied eyes. “So quit looking at me like I’m rabid.”

“Will you keep it down; I’m trying to sleep!”

“Clarke,” Raven warns, stepping forward now. “You aren’t going out in that storm.”

“I can handle a bit of rain,” she smirks, no humor in her tone.

“It’s not about the rain: you’ll have no visibility,”

Clarke stills, bow already loaded as she stands at the front door. Red like it’s a stop sign, a streetlight, a warning beacon.

She scoffs, rolling her eyes all she can before she meets Raven’s firm gaze and whispers as low as her voice will take itself.

“I thought I was joking about the chains,”

The pointed spite in her voice sets Raven’s expression and she backs away, placing her hands on the edge of Clarke’s bow.

“We are not turning on one another,” she says, confident no matter how much she is pleading.

“And I’m not trying to. But I need some air before I explode,” she mumbles back, fire having seemed to die down just enough.

Then Octavia steps forward out of the shadows and makes Clarke turn towards the inside of the house. Murphy has appeared in the living room doorway, leaning on to it and watching them all silently.

“Clarke, what even got you like this?” The brunette asks.

And then a silhouette drops down to the top of the stairs like he’s running to see what the problem is, but he stops and steps into light coming from nowhere.

Watching her, forever seeing right through her, Bellamy is wearing a thousand questions on his face and he catches Clarke’s eyes like he knew she was going to fall.

“Clarke?”

And now, his voice is everything compared to the thunder. It streams around the house more fluid than the rain that is falling, and if she stays for one more second then she’s going to blow.

She spins back around, breaking the question hanging thick in the air and reaches for the brass doorknob like it hasn’t been frozen cold.

She moves to pull open the door, catching barely a glimpse of the lightning before his hand is hard and steady against the wood, pushing against however hard she’s pulling.

Clarke puts up a good fight but he’s clearly stronger than her, not even taking a breath as he pushes forward.

The door slams shut, echoing through the house, and he’s standing behind her. The front of his chest practically forcing its way into her shoulder, and Bellamy is breathing heavily against her back.

Her hand falls from the door and she turns to meet him, pursing her lips.

His face hovers next to hers, taking up everything Clarke can see, and he looks desperate, frantically searching in an attempt to understand her.

He’s reading her, taking her apart brick by brick.

“Don’t go,” he whispers, way too quiet for the others to have heard it.

She can count on one hand the number of times that she has seen him truly vulnerable, truly like he’ll be ready to give up the world to get what he needs.

This is another tally to the chart.

She says nothing, too busy trying to figure out what to do.

“What do you need?” he asks her, his hand moving to grace her wrist but as his fingers loop around, she knows if she asks him to let her go, he’d do it without thinking twice.

“You’re driving me crazy,” she admits, hoping the half-truth is convincing enough.

She says it so only he can hear it.

Clarke watches his eyes flutter closed, blinking for longer than what is normal to blink, before he restores himself.

“Me?”

Her eyes flicker away from his, drifting naturally over to Raven and it takes one look to know. Raven understands everything. But the worst part is, in the depth of the shadow, she’s smiling, despite all of the stern grimaces, and there is a delicacy to her grin, a masked glee.

“All of you,” Clarke says, sighing as she lies through her teeth.

And he is about to retaliate, about to question something else but the words never escape past his perfectly chapped lips because his sister steps in front of him and braces a hand on his shoulder.

“Bellamy, let go,” she tells him, unarguably. “Clarke, do not go outside right now.”

She doesn’t say it as a demand which is perfect because if anyone else tells her what to do one more time then she really is going to explode.

But she also doesn’t leave any room to fight back.

“Murphy is going to make us all some tea and we’re going to all-”

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” she snaps.

“I was going to say,” Octavia warns, raising her eyebrows to tell her that there is no point in rising to the challenge. “that we’re all going to play the boardgame that Raven found underneath the stairs.”

Clarke tries one more time, just for the sake of it.

“If it’s monopoly, O, I swear to God-”

But Octavia cuts her off, wearing a grimace that lets her know the answer.

“Word of advice,” she starts, reaching to pat Clarke’s shoulder in consolidation. “Don’t even try to be the hat. Bellamy is always the hat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Drink up baby, look at the stars,'  
> \- Between the Bars, Elliott Smith


	10. I break the law once every week to feel your touch

Irony really will be the death of her.

Clarke had sat in that window for hours and hours without getting even a drop of rain on her face, and now as she sits surrounded by the crusted four walls of a tiled kitchen, irony hits her smack in the middle of the face.

Well, the irony only hits her figuratively. Bellamy’s spit and about half of the tea he’d taken in are what hit her in the face, literally.

“What the fuck did you put in this?” he snaps, turning on Murphy as he uses his nails to scrape at his tongue, trying to scratch off the remnants of whatever Murphy had laced the drink with.

Raven and Octavia don’t look up from where they are dealing out the frayed notes of counterfeit money, but Clarke looks between the two of them tiredly.

Murphy doesn’t react, he just snatches at the boot counter and chucks it on to _GO_ carelessly.

“Honey,” he shrugs. “Like you guys did,”

Bellamy growls and Clarke ignores the smile already creeping up on her. She’s trying not to feel out of place. Having mellowed from her outburst, all that’s left is this cloud hanging over her and while they are all kind enough to wait for it to settle, she feels like she’s wearing permanent blank ink on her forehead, the word _unstable_ written plain as day.

She reaches for her own steaming mug to hide her face, and sips timidly at it.

Five seconds later, Clarke returns Bellamy’s favor as the contents of her mouth are launched at his face.

“That is not honey,” she winces reluctantly, regretting even trying to see what it was.

She meets Bellamy’s eyes, which are balancing droplets of tea carefully. There’s no blame in them, no anger like she thought there might be. He turns to Murphy, training his face again.

“Where the hell did you get it from?” he asks, voice steady.

Raven reaches for her own mug, finally finished with dispersing the dollars, and eyes it curiously at the rim.

Murphy pauses in counting his money, shoving his way up from the raised counter and sighing heavily, muttering something snarky and obscene through his teeth that Clarke barely catches.

He reaches down to one of the bottom cabinets and as soon as Clarke sees where he’s aiming for, she knows they’re in trouble.

He pulls out a jar that looks more green than yellow, looking nothing like the golden syrup that they’d found yesterday.

Clarke looks to Bellamy. He’s gone green.

“See? Bottom cupboard. The one with the rat’s nest in it?” he still looks clueless. “What? You used it earlier, I thought you wouldn’t mind the mold?”

Bellamy stands up wordlessly, takes Murphy’s mug over to him without a sound, and trades it off for the jar, silver label wrapped snug around it with the words ‘French mustard’ in bold italics.

Murphy still hasn’t seen the label so he takes the mug, determined to prove that they are all overreacting, but the second the tea touches his lips he spits it to the window, graceless.

Clarke grins, a finger covering her mouth to conceal it, but it’s toothy and wide and unrelenting when Bellamy looks back to her, glimpses of a smirk seeping through as soon as he sees Murphy gagging.

 

…

 

“I own boardwalk and park place,” Clarke sighs, hours in and feeling more exhausted than she has in ages.

Bellamy scowls, nudging the little top hat back to her property after he’d dropped it on the border between that and _GO_.

“I don’t have any money left,” he mutters, tossing the dice over to his sister. She catches both in one hand.

“Then give me a property,” she smirks, game face on.

“I don’t want to,”

“Tough. Fair is fair,”

“I’ll carry all of your wet gear for a week,” he tries, flashing his eyebrows in a way he might think can charm her over.

Like he’s sliding a beer over to her in a bar and challenging her to a game of darts. Winner gets to take the other one home.

“I can carry my own shit,” she laughs.

“Fine,” he sighs back, face set and already apologetic, eyes wilting in mourning. “Then don’t say I didn’t try to find another way,”

Octavia opens her mouth to ask what on Earth he might be talking about, but before she can say anything, the board has left the table and is hurling itself through the air.

The pieces, the properties and houses and hotels tornado their way across the room, landing in each corner without grace, all falling at the same time and clattering like coins from a pocket.

“What the fuck!?” Raven shouts, shoving the wad of bills she was holding close to her chest like playing cards over to the center of the now bare table.

She turns on Bellamy angrily, trying and failing to keep the long line of property cards she has from falling into place with everyone else’s.

He is trying not to laugh, really trying as he conceals it with a grimace, and grows smaller under Raven’s glare.

“She left me no choice!” he shrugs, holding his hands up in defense.

“You dick! You only did that because you were losing,”

“Well obviously,” he rolls his eyes. “It’s tradition.”

“Someone had too,” Murphy adds in, a new ounce of respect for Bellamy glinting in his almost black irises.

Clarke covers her mouth with her palm, keeping her eyebrows pulled down so that she can regain control over her own expression.

“It’s not funny, Clarke,” Raven says, standing with her hands on her hips.

“I didn’t say it was. I solemnly swear that I am just as pissed as you are,” she answers, trying her best to seem sincere as she doodles a cross over her heart with her index finger.

“You’re a shitty liar Griffin,” Bellamy’s smirk is glorious, all toothy and friendly but gloating all the same.

“And don’t you think for a second that you aren’t cleaning every last bit of this crappy game up,”

“No fair!”

Raven laughs sardonically as she reaches over to flick the only survivor off of the table; a teeny red hotel that had been on Bellamy’s yellow property.

 

…

 

“Clarke,” Raven says from the kitchen doorway as Bellamy packs the last of the hotels away into the box and Clarke fishes out the last of the hundred dollar bills from underneath the stools.

“Yeah?” she asks, head flashing up.

She nods for Clarke to follow her before she walks away, not sparing a glance to the others.

Clarke looks around, merely wondering if Raven might not be talking to just her and she catches Murphy staring at the spot that Raven has just vacated.

She stands up, throwing an apologetic smile to the Blakes before she heads off to follow.

Bellamy catches her eye, another silent conversation that he gets his answer for before Clarke can even wrap her head around the concern in the purse of his lips.

She steps into the living room where Raven is hanging over the back of the couch, shades pulled to the side as she cranes towards the storm.

Clarke slumps down on the floor, kicking her feet towards the fire as she lets her back fall into a cushion of the smaller couch.

When Raven snaps her head around, she crawls away from the window and ropes the shades to stay open.

“I’m sorry that I snapped,” Clarke offers when Raven kicks her ankle.

“And you should be. But that is not what I want to talk about, and you know it,”

She levels Clarke with a glare and waits.

“I don’t know what to say, Rae,”

“And you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. I just don’t want you to convince yourself of anything when you don’t have all of the facts,”

“Then what’s going on between you and Murphy?”

“Murphy?” Raven stills, eyes wide.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed,”

Clarke receives a side-eye in response to the smirk she shoots Raven’s way. They’re at a standstill, neither willing to admit to anything yet. Not that they wouldn’t admit whatever it is to each other; they’d do that in a heartbeat, but more to themselves.

“When did this all get so complicated?” Raven hums, head falling into Clarke’s lap as she kicks back.

Clarke sighs in return before she thinks of something.

“Did the Beatles ever sing country?” she asks casually, nonchalant as she drifts back to last night. As his melody danced in her ears.

“Um, I don’t know. Why?”

“No reason,” Clarke sighs, still not quite sure if he made that damn song up. “How is Octavia doing?”

Raven shrugs.

“She’ll be fine by tomorrow. I think the award for biggest overreaction of the year goes to her brother,” she snorts.

“Nah, I get why he was worried,” Clarke says as she flows her fingers through Raven’s ponytail.

The brunette shifts, a thousand questions channeled in her eyes.

“She’s the only certainty in his life,”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s quite true anymore,”

Clarke pats her head and decides she’s not going to let Raven keep prying unless she gets some information of her own.

“The other night,” she settles as she kicks another log into the fire. “When me and O were fighting, what did you two talk about?”

“What do you mean?” Raven shifts, spinning on to her side so that she doesn’t have to look Clarke in the eye.

“You two were arguing,” she says, rolling her eyes all the way around the room. “I could read it on both of you, clear as day.”

“How?” Raven asks as the glint in her eyes returns, smiling just that bit.

“I know three people, and only three people, who wear their hearts like it is sewn on to their sleeves. And all three of you are in this house. You were both pissed and there is no denying it,”

“What do you want to know?” she mutters, bracing herself.

“What were you two fighting about?”

“You,”

It knocks her back, neck retracting, because out of the thousand different reasons her mind had torn itself through that night, the idea that either of them could possibly disagree on anything to do with her, had not once been considered.

“Why?” she all but laughs, throwing her head back to cover up the blush rising through her cheeks.

“Not for me to tell,” Raven shrugs as though it was nothing, everything but the absent shine in her eyes reaffirms her tone.

“But there is one absolutely, undeniably scandalous thing you could do,”

It’s a sarcastic drawl if Clarke has ever heard one.

“What?”

“Ask Bellamy,”

She waits a minute for it to sink in before she moves to stand up.

“Get some sleep, Clarke,”

There’s light coming through the window, but only just. The sun is all the way up and yet the all-nighter that she has just pulled hits her like a train.

“We’ve got a long day tomorrow,”

“What are we doing?” she asks, wriggling down further into the floor to get comfortable, eyes already glued shut. “Round two of that shit?”

She can picture Raven’s grimace clear as anything as they both think back to the car crash of Monopoly.

“Nuh, uh. You lot are out there with me. I need all hands on deck with that piece of shit truck,”

“All nine of ‘em,” Clarke mumbles into the side of the sofa and she’s already dreaming when Raven’s snickers fill the hall.

 

…

 

There’s a snap of firewood, a crack of whatever else they’ve been fueling the fire with, and there is a soft hand in her hair as she wakes up.

Someone is humming softly in the living room, the other end of it if Clarke had to guess.

She won’t open her eyes because they are way too heavy, and she couldn’t lift them even if she tried.

She’s lying flat on the ground, head cradled by a cushion and she’s curled up against something insanely warm.

“I’ll do it,” Murphy’s voice calls from somewhere else in the house, as he stomps around.

“No!” Bellamy all but shouts, almost straight into her ear.

So she’s got her answer as to what she’s clutching at, soft fabric rippling between her fingers.

His hip is tucked sweetly against her stomach and Clarke has no clue about how long he’s been sitting there, the skin of his arm- which is slung over the couch above her head- radiating comfort.

And now that she knows he’s right beside her, Clarke can hear the fan of his breath wash against the side of her face that isn’t pressed into the gap between him and the ground.

“Let her sleep,” he softens drastically, finger curling into one of the infinite strands of her hair.

He still thinks she’s asleep. She hopes she shouldn’t feel guilty for pretending just a bit longer, because if she reveals that she’s actually awake then she’ll have to pull away.

“When she wakes, she’ll move mountains,”

The past few months have been hard, insurmountably hard. But the hardest thing that she’s had to do to date is hold in the laugh that threatens to erupt when she hears what he says. Nerd.

“Bellamy, stop quoting Shakespeare!” Octavia hollers across the house.

“You weren’t supposed to get the reference,” he mutters more to himself because there is no way that O would be able to hear that.

Clarke nuzzles further into his side, only to hide the smile that is spilling over.

“How long shall we leave her for?”

That’s Raven, and it’s quiet enough for it to have been said in this room, so Clarke gets her answer as to who was humming.

“There’s no rush. We don’t have anywhere to be,”

Silence. Heavy with the thoughts streaming out of both their minds.

Maybe Clarke _should_ feel guilty, but she doesn’t because he smells so much like home.

“What did you say to her last night?” Raven asks after enough time has passed for Clarke to start drifting off again. Pulled back to the conversation like a magnet.

He doesn’t say anything back, and she can’t even guess at the expression he’s wearing.

The thumb against her forehead shifts slightly, and his finger tightens in her hair, unnoticeable if he hadn’t scratched her skull just that bit. A puff of air leaves her lips before she can help it, content and almost desperate for him to do that again.

“She’s not going to break, Raven,” he says, tired.

“You think I don’t know that?” Raven’s voice is suddenly bitter, territorial to an extent. There is a pause until: “Neither of you have thought this through.”

Clarke’s feet are almost touching the flames of the fire, and she fidgets when one of them catches her toe directly. The reflex sends her foot under Bellamy’s and now they really are intertwined, leg over leg over leg.

He makes a sound. Clarke ignores it.

“There’s nothing to think through,”

“I like you Bellamy, but if you keep trying to bullshit me then I am gonna lose it,”

“We can have this conversation later,”

“No,”

“Raven, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen her like this,”

Clarke hopes the blush isn’t too obvious on her ears.

“Can we please just let her rest?”

And it’s official: her heart has melted.

Raven has softened and takes her time to answer.

“Sure, Bellamy. We can let her rest,”

Footsteps patter out of the room, lightly like she’s hovering on tiptoes, but his breathing stays steady and drifts no further away.

His palm falls to her cheek now, thumb brushing her eyelashes so Clarke has to flutter them subconsciously, eyes staying shut.

“I won’t break you, Princess,” he promises, whisper softer and more like he’s only breathing the words and not really putting sound to it, like he’s trying to steal something that shouldn’t be his. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to,”

She rubs her forehead into his shirt, overwhelmed with just… him.

And she’ll wake up when she wants to. For now she’s content with being held as though she’s something special, something to be cherished, something worth being held.

 

…

 

True to her word, Raven makes everyone trek out to the truck in the afternoon, after Clarke has slept for a few more hours.

She wakes up once more, still with Bellamy next to her like he was earlier but as soon as he notices her stirring, his hand leaves her head and he shuffles away a few inches.

She figures that if she hadn’t woken up to him holding her a few hours ago, this time she’d think nothing of how he’s sat: casually and like he would if he were sat next to anybody, throwing a knife up and spinning it in the air to see how many times he can risk it without cutting himself, like he’s been doing this for hours.

She could kiss him.

“How long have I been out?” she asks as she scrubs at her face.

“Few hours,” he shrugs, not quite meeting her eye.

“You should have woken me,”

It’s technically true, but she’s glad that he didn’t.

He hands her a packet of walnuts, and she tips them into her mouth until she looks like a chipmunk.

“Cute, Princess,” he smirks as he moves to stand up. “Raven’s being a drill sergeant about that truck so the sleeping beauty is needed.”

He bows gracefully, mimicking the movements of a character Clarke doesn’t have the brain power to place.

“Wake me when it’s over,” she mumbles, shoving her head into the couch cushions.

His hands link with hers.

“C’mon, I need someone to get me through it,”

She might throw herself a bit too much into his arms when he lifts her.

She’s too happy to care.

“So, I’ve been thinking,” Octavia starts, mischief creeping into her face already. She and Murphy are sat in the back of the truck, on the cargo bed, having given up hours ago.

They’re all still being rained on but O is wearing about five fleeces and two waterproofs so she should be okay.

“Riveting,”

“Shut up,” she scolds Murphy, kicking at his knee.

“Do enlighten us,” he decides, waving his hand graciously.

“I don’t know the date or anything but I’m guessing we’ve got to be in December now, right?”

Clarke has a plastic bucket in one hand and a sponge in the other, currently wiping down the gross layer of dirt from the surface of the truck.

Bellamy is down by her feet, changing the popped tire for one he found in the front shed.

He looks at her, already rolling his eyes fondly.

“Probably,” he sounds, breath a little ragged as he jacks the car up.

It sends a shiver down her spine.

“And we said that we’d stay here for a while?”

“What are you getting at?” Raven calls from the bonnet, picking her way through it in a way only she knows to do.

“I want to have a Christmas,”

Nobody really says anything. Murphy snorts, but he does that more than he breathes so it goes unnoticed.

“You what?” Clarke asks at the same time Bellamy starts with his “O…”

“No, Bell,” she already snaps. “We missed your birthday, we missed thanksgiving.”

She holds her hand out and pulls at her fingers to count out each one.

“You guys have all raved on about how you don’t want to lose yourselves. Well, what are we fighting for if we can’t at least have one day to be us again? The end of the world doesn’t have to be the end of _our_ world.”

Clarke cranes her head, trying to wrap her head around the cliché.

“Okay, that didn’t really make sense, but you know what I’m trying to say,”

Bellamy shakes his head, but it’s futile because he already has his mind set on giving his sister what she wants.

“I haven’t been able to remember the date for months,”

“Of Christmas?” Clarke asks because she can’t help herself, grinning before she even finishes the joke.

He rolls his eyes.

“Cute,”

Murphy has his chin in his hand, drawing something in the dust lining the cargo bed.

“How will we even know when?” he asks, considering it.

“It’s usually a pretty good giveaway when a fat bearded man falls down the chimney,” Raven shouts over.

She gets ignored by everyone except Clarke, who winks over at her briefly.

“Do we have to know when?” Octavia asks, face set to prove her point. “We can make our own Christmas,”

“That’s not how it works,”

“I’m not missing anything else. Humanity doesn’t just apply to saving people’s lives,”

She gestures over at Murphy, flippantly but too pointedly and too quickly for Clarke to intervene, and he picks up on it if the way his face becomes occupied, confused as he thinks it over.

She didn’t want him to find out that they went into the safehouse for him, but with this then he’s surely going to figure it out eventually.

“I mean it’s not like we can’t get a tree,” he shrugs, although it’s clear his line of thought hasn’t drifted from O’s comment.

“ _And_ we have to find something to do if we’re going to be here for weeks,”

“You freeloaders,” Raven snaps, without malice. “Some of us plan on actually helping out,”

Octavia ignores her again, too preoccupied with her plan of action to take in anything beyond what’s right in front of her face.

“Clarke can kill a bird or something,” she wonders, becoming lost.

“I am not playing Monopoly again,” Clarke sighs, gaze falling down to Bellamy as she sends him a warning look.

Octavia just laughs, and crawls forward to rest her hand on Clarke’s shoulder.

“Suck it up, Griffin. It’s family time now.”

“If you guys insist on slacking then you can at least do it somewhere that isn’t in my way,” Raven shoos Murphy towards the end of the cargo bed, with a swift shove of her hand.

“Now where’s the fun in that,” he smirks back, leaning in only a bit towards her.

Clarke tries to hide the grin that wipes across her face. She can’t.

 

…

 

That night, Murphy and Bellamy climb their way up to the attic to look for some Christmas decorations and come down with about seven boxes of crap that they spend the rest of the evening wading through to pick out the salvageable baubles.

It’s fun. Clarke could do it all week.

And so, she does.

Octavia has set the date for ten days’ time. That should be enough for the storm to pass through and for them to all really collect their bearings.

Raven makes a comment at some point, about how it would all be so much easier if they just stayed here and let themselves wait for the apocalypse to work itself out.

It only takes one look for her to be reminded of their responsibilities, and it drives her to work even harder on the truck, to the point where she falls asleep under the hood and Clarke has to go and coax her out of it.

A few days in, Murphy and Clarke are sat either side of the kitchen counter, throwing nuts into each other’s mouths to see how long they can keep the streak going.

They’re on fourteen when he starts on her.

“So, you’ve got a bit of a hero complex, huh?” he asks as he very nearly almost misses her mouth and she has to snap her head to catch it.

“What gives you that idea?” she says casually, lining her next shot up.

“You didn’t go to Nebraska just for a few more woolly jackets,”

“We needed them,”

He doesn’t buy it, and she knew he wouldn’t even as she says it.

“That’s not what I said,”

She sighs and rolls her eyes when he misses her face by a longshot, shrugging her head into her hand to give up.

“We wanted to look for survivors,”

He tuts, clearly annoyed.

“You guys risked everything you had,”

There’s that survivor’s guilt again, always there in the corners of his face.

“And we found you,” she shrugs again.

Clarke gets up to stand and slaps him on his good arm, brushing the conversation off by playing up to her own confidence.

“It’s time to be the good guys now, Murphy,”

She can hear his smirk when he threatens to puke.

And they’re good like that.

He probably hasn’t yet come to terms with the fact that he owes every single one of them his life, but she probably wouldn’t if it were her.

That doesn’t make him any less a part of their team though. He’ll realize that one day.

 

…

 

On the designated night before Christmas, the five of them are all crowded around the ceaseless fire, having dragged Raven in because the winds had picked up again, threatening round six or seven of the obstinate storm.

Clarke and Octavia are slouched on the smaller couch, with Bellamy at their feet, and Raven is laid across the other one, the larger one.

“Murphy will you leave that damn fire alone?” Raven snaps with her eyes squeezed shut. “I told you I had it handled.”

“It’s dying,” he snarks back, adding another few logs.

“You think I don’t know how to keep a fire going?”

Murphy turns around to look at the other three, exasperated if anything.

“She always been this insufferable?” he all but pleads, jerking his head over at the half-asleep brunette.

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that just because you’ve been told a few times in your life that you aren’t completely braindead, it doesn’t mean you know everything,”

“Yeah well I know how not to be a prat to the people who I’m stuck with,” Raven sulks and Murphy turns around to get more involved in the argument.

Clarke watches them in amusement, wishing she had a bowl of popcorn to snack on.

Bellamy turns his head, shaggy and freshly trimmed hair brushing her leg, to grin at her boyishly.

She’d dragged him into the upstairs bathroom a couple days ago and practically shoved him on to a stool, refusing any attempts he made to tell her that his hair looked fine just the way it was.

And to be perfectly honest, Clarke thinks that even if he grew a rainbow afro, it wouldn’t make him look any less irresistible. Okay, maybe not the rainbow. But close enough.

“Is this what we sounded like?” he whispers, leaning in conspiratorially.

Octavia bursts out laughing instantly, leaving Clarke no time to reply.

“Oh, you two were way worse than this,” she tries, barely catching her breath.

He squirms a bit, gruffly answering.

“I beg to differ,”

“Beg all you want. I didn’t get more than five minutes to think in the first few days we found you. All I could hear was Bellamy nattering on about how stubborn you are,” she grins to Clarke, blanking out Bellamy’s noise of outrage.

“Yeah, well he didn’t exactly make it any easier,”

“See?” Octavia turns to her brother, gesturing between the two of them like the pretend scowl he sends her way is genuine. But there is still a smirk plastered to her face. “Way worse.”

Clarke opens her mouth to argue back but Bellamy raises his hand.

“Shh, Princess, arguing will only fuel the fire,”

She narrows her eyes at him, corners of her mouth twirling upwards.

“Don’t you start,” she warns, leaning down to level her face with his.

As Clarke moves towards him, his gaze follows her and she’s not sure if she imagines the way he swallows heavily.

When she almost closes the gap between them, Bellamy is still watching her. And for just a moment, his eyes drop down to see the words her lips are about to form.

She doesn’t say anything though, and when that becomes clear, it also becomes clear that he’s just sat watching her lips, not really waiting for her to speak anymore.

She licks her bottom lip, suddenly nervous and she barely has time to remember that they are sat right next to his _sister_ before he whispers, lowly.

“Or what?” Bellamy asks, eyes still trained on her mouth as he flicks his eyebrows.

“Or I’ll make you carry my wet gear for a week,” she recalls, and leans back into O with her head resting on the brunette’s shoulder lazily.

When she pulls away he starts laughing, turning back to face the full blown argument between Murphy and Raven- both standing chest to chest now- and if this is what family time is meant to be, then Clarke will hold on to it for as long as she can.

 

…

 

Hours after the sun has set, they’re still all hanging around in the living room swapping jabs for useless anecdotes and trivial questions that mean nothing now.

Octavia has gone to make herself some tea but she walks back in moments later, holding a bottle arms’ length away from her body and watching it like it’s about to explode.

There’s about a liter of colorless liquid in it, looking almost like lighter fluid and it is adorned with a cheap sticky label, the word _Moonshine_ scrawled on in HB pencil.

She’s wearing an expression completely taken by surprise as she brings it to the center of the room and Bellamy stands up when he reads the note.

“Holy shit!” he gasps. “Is this stuff even legal?”

Raven lets out a loud laugh, similar to a shriek.

“Hell no,” she jumps up and yanks the bottle from Octavia’s hands. “I’d say it’s closer to bleach than anything drinkable.”

“Nah if we water it down, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” O waves a hand and gets out her canteen, already taking the lid off and practically bubbling over with excitement.

Bellamy eyes it suspiciously.

“You add even a drop of this to your water and it’ll kill everything in there,” he says, uncertain but there’s hope lining his words.

“Exactly why we should risk it,” Clarke laughs, mostly sarcastic although she wouldn’t mind trying it in all honesty.

“Come on Bell, let’s have some fun.”

Octavia passes five mugs around, topping them up with water and she spills only a few drops before she takes the bottle and adds a bit more than a splash to each one.

It’s an awkward cheers, because this stuff could be toxic for all they know, and yet if this lifestyle has taught them anything, it is that they are going to have to live life however they want to if it’s going to be worth it at all.

Murphy wretches when he downs the first half of his mug, and it breaks the weirdness because everyone starts laughing at how pathetic he is.

And then after that, the night is pretty much one big blur because happy turns into tipsy and tipsy turns into mildly unaware and mildly unaware turns into definitely, horrendously, miraculously drunk.

If this were any other night, Clarke would be adamant that this is way too much of a risk. But there’s something about this place that makes everything feel safe, makes anything feel plausible.

Bellamy starts complaining about how his ass is basically dead when Clarke is wiping tears from her eyes after Raven recounts the time her and Wells hijacked the school’s telecom system because Clarke had been accused of cheating on their midterms.

So she tells him to stop being such a baby while she shifts closer to Octavia to make some room for him on her other side.

And she doesn’t think about anything when he tugs at her waist and folds her into his lap wordlessly, his grumbling chuckle ringing in her ears as Octavia asks Murphy a hypothetical that Clarke doesn’t quite pick up.

The moonshine is disgusting, like actual drain cleaner, but they seem to have mastered the perfect ratio of water to bleach in order to not completely lose their heads.

It might not be Christmas, because the tree is basically the thick branch of one of the ones that are surrounding the farm, and they haven’t got any Mariah Carey to dance around to, but Clarke’s blood flows warm through her flushed cheeks and it’s good enough.

Even Murphy has let himself go; his arm thrown around Raven like he hasn’t noticed it at all. Raven doesn’t seem to be complaining either, if the way that her lazy smile sticks to her face is anything to go by.

“Wait so you gave Clarke a black eye because of that?” Murphy drawls, words scattered drunkenly.

“She was the other woman,” Raven shrugs, a bit too smug when she catches Clarke’s eye. “I was jealous.”

“He must have been the world’s best shagger,”

Clarke snorts, unable to put a filter on herself.

“Then what was so special about this guy?”

“I don’t know,” Clarke answers. “He just made you feel wanted I guess,”

Bellamy shifts uncomfortably beneath her, muttering something to himself, a string of curse words that make Clarke blush.

“Then I hope you had the world’s best rebound sex,” Murphy corrects himself.

“Oh trust me, I did,” Raven laughs back, unthinkingly.

“Ew, ew, ew, I do not need to hear this,” Octavia cries, smacking her hands to her ears in a frenzy.

Bellamy shifts again, and Clarke looks around the room, confused about what she might be missing out on.

“Wait, what?” she asks, looking to Raven.

“I told you about the guy with the fingers,” she shrugs back, casually like there isn’t anything to catch on to. And then she nods over to Bellamy and he makes a groan that makes him sound more awkward than ever.

Clarke turns around to look at him, and he raises a hand as if to say ‘hi, I’m here. nice to meet ya,’.

And Clarke can’t really figure out anything to say, because she makes the link to ‘Raven’s roommate’s brother’ and it feels a bit like a punch to the stomach.

She’s not jealous, because there’s not really much to be jealous of aside from the obvious. It’s not like her and Bellamy even look at each other like that.

This whole thing just feels very very familiar, because Raven was there first and Clarke is always going to be sloppy seconds.

Which is so dumb to think about now, and yet her drunken mind feels the need to bring out every little thing that she’s shoved down in the past few months.

Her face might falter for a moment, but that’s all, because she schools her expression and shrugs too.

“It was years ago,” Bellamy says quietly, only to her like it even matters. “We were both too wasted to remember much of it anyway.”

What he’s saying is true, she can hear that in his voice.

“No, sure,” she nods.

“He was just a rebound,” Raven repeats.

It feels like she’s being put under a microscope by every single person in the room, like there’s a spotlight shining in her eyes, waiting for her to burst into tears or something.

Murphy clears his throat, easing the tension again.

After a while of listening to them all going at it, Clarke’s mind starts to swirl around and around, and it uses the barely diluted alcohol as its mechanism.

She turns around to talk to Bellamy, whose face is very nearly buried in her neck, his eyelids heavy.

“I’m going to get some air,” she mutters and he nods, shaking his head out and setting his face as he stands with her.

“I’ll come with you,”

They walk out into the kitchen in silence, him following behind her, and she doesn’t look at him until she’s reached the counter at the window.

She braces herself by resting both hands on to it, and she looks out of the window to watch the thunder come back home.

The next thing she knows, Bellamy is sidling up behind her and reaching his fingers up to her chin, pressing lightly so that her bottom lip slips out from under her teeth,

She gapes at him, mouth wide open as he shrugs unabashed.

“It’s hard enough trying to keep it together without you doing that,”

He’s not meeting her eyes again, but the buzz from the moonshine gives her all the confidence she needs to challenge him.

“What?”

He’s standing about a foot away from her. Clarke spins around, still holding herself to the counter, but now she’s facing him properly.

Bellamy has got his head ducked down, hand hanging at his neck like he doesn’t know what to do with it.

His eyes flick up to hers for just a second, and it’s enough to let him know that he’s not getting out of this now.

So, he steps forward just that tiny bit more and sets his eyes to hers.

“You really have no idea,”

When he walks, he wobbles a bit, making it clear that he’s in no right state of mind. His arms come up to either side of her, resting so that his pinky finger hovers over the back of her hand and now she’s caged in, cradled by everything that he is.

“Huh, Princess?”

It’s not anger. It’s more confusion.

His eyes are a musky brown, sort of fusing with the swollen black of his pupils.

She traces every mark on his face, every scar on his lips, every stray hair in his eyebrows.

“You- you’re looking funny,” Clarke stammers, breath melting in the space between them.

“Am I?” he’d be smirking if the smile on his face weren’t so fond it hurts.

Bellamy shuffles his feet forward again, so that the tips of their socks kiss.

She’s scared. For the first time, she’s scared because she has no idea what he’s going to do.

“What are we doing, Bellamy?”

He takes a moment to consider her, eyes drifting down to the centimeter of distance between them before he rakes them back up her body in a way that makes her shiver.

He leans even further into her, hands clenching tightly to hers now, and his lips caress her earlobe when he whispers.

“Whatever the hell we want,”

She smiles into his cheek despite the shake in her spine.

He isn’t saying anything, but his lips are still moving against her ear. Not kissing, never kissing.

Clarke moves one of her hands and puts it to the curl of his bicep, strained but he isn’t under any tension. At least not that she can see.

As she touches him, feels him, Clarke can feel her strength start to seep back into her veins.

“And what,” she says, her voice still, “do you want?”

He doesn’t say anything. He moves his mouth lower, more to the small patch of skin between her ear and head and he’s still not kissing her.

It’s just skin against skin. Lip against jaw. Like all he needs is this.

“Bellamy,” she warns, clutching at his arm.

“Have you always thought this loudly?” he groans, tucking his head into the crook of her neck now like he’s pained.

A hand drifts up to her head, finger pointed as he lets it rest on her temple. He starts drawing careful circles between her hairline and eyebrow.

“I can hear the wheels in your brain going round and round and round,”

“You’re drunk,” she giggles, and ignores the word ‘hypocrite’ branded behind her eyes.

“ _You’re_ drunk,” he fights, grumbling childishly into her collar.

And he’s right, so she won’t try to deny it.

“And if you don’t stop now then I’m going to do something stupid,” Clarke tells him, more honest than she wants to let on.

“Stupid is underrated,”

His boyish grin imprints itself into her skin. And she can’t help it.

She pulls him towards her, erasing that last bit of space as his chest collides into hers.

Her vest top suddenly feels like nothing, goose bumps raised all over her bare chest.

She mirrors the way his face is pressed into her, bringing her hand up to the back of his neck as she tucks her nose under his jaw.

“You smell nice,” she hums, mouth a smile.

And he starts giggling. It’s not a word she ever thought that she’d associate with Bellamy, but here he is, stuttering a _giggle_ into her.

He’s definitely wasted, but he’s happy, and it’s not like he’s doing anything he wouldn’t want to do if he were sober, she tells herself, drunkenly naïve.

She starts to laugh too, endlessly into his own jaw and when she tries to stop, because it’s becoming a bit weird that they’re laughing at basically nothing, she tugs lightly at the nape of his neck. Like she’s punishing him for being so obliviously adorable.

It has the reverse effect.

He makes a sound, raw and animalistic and way too shaky to be safe, and his hand tightens around hers painfully.

“Fuck, Clarke,” he groans quietly into the skin of her jaw, forehead drifting to her shoulder and his mouth falls to the thin strap of her vest top.

Bellamy takes it between his teeth, and bites down on to it.

Her moan is graceless.

He’s barely even touching her and she’s already like putty.

She’s practically pressing him to her now, but that seed of doubt in her mind is still festering so she decides to confront it.

“You don’t have to pretend for me, Bell,” she hums, words soft. “Raven is in there.”

He jerks his head away like he’s been burned and cold washes over every inch of her skin that he’s left bare.

His hand moves from her forehead and wraps itself to the back of her spine because, even with only an ounce of his brain functioning, he still knows everything she needs. He can still see straight through her.

“What?” Bellamy asks, his face twisting innocently.

“If you want to-”

“But I don’t want Raven,”

The way he says it is softer than she could have imagined, because he’s shaking his head like he has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about.

Like it’s unfathomable that he’d be anywhere but here.

And the way he’s looking at her makes her feel like this is something more than just right here, this second, this moment as fleeting as the lightening.

“Hmm,” Clarke hums, torn between being thrown by the intimacy and by the certainty in his eyes.

His arm is looped all the way around her, so tight that he’s holding on to his own t-shirt. Every part of her pulled flush to him.

“You have…” he falters, and he drops his forehead to hers so clumsy that their heads slam together audibly. It doesn’t make her hurt. It’s nothing. “You have no idea what you’re doing to me.”

She closes her eyes, unable to stand what he’s looking at her like.

He releases a breath, and Clarke drinks it in, mouth opening hungrily, dirtily as she saps it up like a drug, his breath burning.

Her hand moves higher into his hair, clutching even tighter when the locks become thicker.

He moans again. He gives her everything, again.

“Then show me,” she whispers, letting her teeth scrape into the skin of his jaw. God, she can already taste him.

There is silence for just over a heartbeat, both too absorbed in the other to form any kind of coherent speech until Clarke feels Bellamy take in a deep breath.

“You’re drunk,” he twists his head against her own, shaking it side to side without once breaking contact.

“ _You’re_ drunk,”

“And if I don’t stop now then we’re going to do something stupid,”

His lips brush her cheek as he talks.

“Bellamy,” she groans, knocking their heads together like a hammer to a nail and he releases a quick puff of air into her mouth again in surprise.

Doesn’t he get that she wants this to happen?

“Clarke,” he whispers back.

His other hand shifts to hold her neck, and he moves his face down so that their cheeks are grazing, his rough stubble scratching determinedly.

And then something wet and soft graces the spot beneath her ear, and his tongue is drawing shapes she’ll never be able to read, lapping at her sweetly.

“Clarke,” he says again.

Her name doesn’t sound like hers anymore. She’ll give it to him, if he wants it.

Ice slices the trail that he leaves behind, cold silk lining her incredibly flushed neck.

“Clarke,”

It’s a groan as he carves out her jaw.

She’s scraping her nails against the skin of his skull, in time to the gentle touches he’s swiping with his tongue.

“I’m weak,” he whispers to her, teeth clamping shut, jaw locking against her own.

“You’re drunk,” she coos, the hand on his arm wrapping under his shoulder and back around because she doesn’t care what else she does as long as he’s against her.

“And I’m afraid,”

“So am I,” she breathes.

“And I am nothing,”

She was wrong. Even if she had met this guy in the lifetime before, she would have had absolutely no say in the matter of her heart.

“Clarke,” he slurs again, voice reverent.

He rubs his skin against hers, and she’s sure that as his stubble scrapes at her cheek, he’s going to leave a thousand pinpricks and she needs the pain of each one.

He holds her jaw in one hand and slides her head to the side, bringing his lips behind her ear.

“You,” he hums as he trails his bottom lip up to her hairline.

“Are,”

She clutches on to him, like she needs him to breathe for her. She’s so scared. Scared like she probably hasn’t ever been, and yet whatever he’s going to do needs to happen.

She needs for him to happen.

“Everything,”

It’s a promise. It’s something he’d never have done if he were sober. It’s a wakeup call. Because she wants this so badly but neither of them have control over their own tongues right now.

If they weren’t clinging to the edge of survival, she’d be begging for him to take her right here, right now. Dirty and biting and everything.

She’d cling to him like tonight is every possible night they might have for the rest of their lives.

But they aren’t in a fantasy land.

“Look me in the eye,” she whispers, her voice ruined.

He follows her order but only drifts far enough away to meet her eyes, his eyelashes fluttering against hers. Butterfly kisses too gentle for words.

She’d be embarrassed about the whimper she makes at his touch, if she didn’t feel so strong when she is melted to him.

“I never said…” she says, knowing that for now, this is all she can say. “You never let me say… I can’t do that either,”

He questions her with the way his eyes flutter closed, a blink that lasts just a couple seconds too long.

“Can’t do what?” he asks, knowing that she’s already pulling away from whatever this is. And he’s nodding to himself, preparing himself for their separation. His finger is still pinching at her hip, like he’s dreading taking his hand away.

“I can’t lose you,”

And he sighs, choked. Beautiful.

She’s admitted to things that she has no idea about, but he seems to understand her. She pulls at his hair one last time and he groans into her shoulder once more.

And then Clarke slides out from where he has surrounded her and takes his hand because she already misses him.

She knew she’d die for this man on the night he held her, endlessly comforting her from her nightmare.

But now she knows something more, something irrevocable.

She’d burn for him. Burn hot enough to make the stars look like ice.

 

…

 

Clarke wakes up first the next morning, her head in Bellamy’s lap and her legs swung over Raven’s shoulders.

Her mind feels like there are bass drums in every crevice. Everyone is breathing way too loudly, like they’re shouting into microphones applied to her ears.

She pulls herself up, stumbling gracelessly over Raven’s bag and falling to her knees before she heads upstairs.

The storm is amplified even more now, but she needs to be able to see the chaos in her head, so she heads to the window that she’s come to spend every night at.

She swings her legs over the ledge and waits for the world to stop spinning around her.

When Octavia takes the seat next to her, Clarke starts to panic about how bad her breath is but decides she doesn’t care moments later.

“Merry Christmas,” she groans, fingers rubbing at her forehead like it’ll take away the pain.

“That stuff was poison,”

“You started it,”

“No regrets,” O laughs, bumping Clarke’s shoulder a little too much for their hangovers.

“You want to come hunting with me?” Clarke asks, nodding out into the woods.

The brunette looks like she’s returning to full health, all nine lives back and restored. So Clarke doesn’t really worry when she offers for her to join her on the outing.

O knows her own limits. She’s an adult after all.

“Sure,”

Quiet, just how Clarke needs it.

“Christmas was the one day of the year where we’d let ourselves go back to normal,” Octavia whispers after a while. “The rest of the year we all had our roles. Bell would look after me. Our Mom would go across town doing…”

Clarke looks to her, meeting her eye to let her know that it’s okay.

“Doing whatever she needed to do to earn the money. But at Christmas, she’d go back to being my mother. And Bell would get to be a kid again, just for that one day.”

“That’s why you need this?”

“I think we all need this. We’re happy here you know? Even Murphy was cry laughing last night,”

“It’s nice,” Clarke hums.

“I’m not naïve enough to hope that this will last,” Octavia deadpans, nodding her head and looking more mature than she ever has. “But we’re going to enjoy today.”

“Yeah, O, we are.”

“What happened between you two last night?”

Memories come back to her like instant photos. Glimpses of hot breath and slick trails along her jawline.

“I don’t know,” Clarke answers honestly.

“He makes you happy?” O says, oddly gentle. It’s almost a question.

“He does,”

“And you make him happy,” this one isn’t a question.

Clarke doesn’t say anything, throat flooded.

“It doesn’t seem too complicated when you put it like that,” Octavia shrugs.

“It’s not that easy,”

She’s way too hungover to have this conversation.

“Nothing ever is,”

“When Raven told me about you in college, she said that you were the strongest person she’d ever met. I guess I respected you long before I ever met you. She said that you had been through hell and back with your family and that, if there’s anyone she’d ever be able to rely on then it’d always be you.”

Clarke smiles shyly, ducking her head. She doesn’t say anything because Octavia looks like her train of thought is fleeting.

“Love isn’t something that comes easy to us,”

O moves to stand, watching the sun start to shine through the weighted clouds.

“Merry Christmas, Clarke,” she whispers, patting her on the back and welcoming everything that comes with the touch.

“Merry Christmas, O.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'I break the law once every week to feel your touch,'  
> \- The Start of Something, Voxtrot


	11. Cradle me, I'll cradle you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don't hate Clarke in this chapter!

Five days after Christmas, Raven comes sprinting into the cottage with her hands in the air, practically bubbling over with excitement

“Ha!” she shrieks, almost barreling into Clarke.

Octavia barely misses falling off of her stool when she startles.

“I did it!”

Clarke looks around her, trying to catch on to why Raven is smiling like a madman.

“Can you hear that? Can you hear it?” she squeals and clutches on to Clarke’s shoulders.

There is a faint humming coming from the driveway, only noticeable if she drowns out every other noise in the room.

“Suck it bitches!”

Raven throws her hands even higher in the air, punching Bellamy in the arm on her way past him.

“The truck,” Octavia gasps, actually falling off the stool when she stands up to run to it.

“You actually did it?” Murphy asks, surprise dripping from his tongue.

They all maneuver their way out to the front of the house.

Clarke ignores the way her stomach sinks when she sees the shining new black sheen of the truck, vibrating with the pull of the engine.

Tires blown full; bumper shined to perfection.

“Well done Reyes,” Bellamy laughs, head shaking like he can’t quite believe it and he slaps her shoulder to return the favor.

They start to circle their way around the truck, fingers sliding their way around the metal of the cargo bed.

Clarke shifts over to the driver’s seat, ignoring the way the door moans on its hinges as she takes the chair, hands resting on the leathered steering wheel.

There is a gear shift, so that means she’ll probably have to be the one driving, being the only one she knows who can drive stick.

She doesn’t care. This truck is going to get them there in fucking days. She’s going to see Wells in mere _days._

This is the final stretch and she knows it. She can feel it, fingers humming over the wheel, itching to grip it.

“So this is it?” Octavia’s voice breaks the reverent silence.

“This is what?” Murphy calls from the seat next to Clarke, running his hand across the dashboard.

“We really haven’t got an excuse to stay anymore,”

“We have a car now,” Clarke says softly as O approaches the window at her side, arms crossing to rest into it. “If everything works out, we’ll be in Vancouver in no time,”

The storm has eased now. It has run away to some other deserted state, leaving behind an icy shadow but at least they don’t have to worry about their boots being flooded every time they leave the house.

This is the time to leave, and they all know it.

“This is the last stretch ladies,” Raven smirks, shoving Murphy into the middle seat so that she can clamber in.

There are three seats along the front of the truck, so each time they ride, they are going to have to store two of them in the cargo bed.

That probably would have had to happen anyway though, so that that can keep watch from both the front and the back.

“I was thinking,” Raven adds. “We won’t be able to drive too fast. We want to keep the engine noise levels to a minimum. And we’ll have to take all the dirt roads we can, all the side alleys. We can’t try the highways,”

Clarke nods, shifting the gear stick in anticipation.

Something makes a noise behind her head and she turns to it.

It’s Bellamy, lowering the window that splits the driver’s seat and the cargo bed. He’s crouching behind her, leaning over the seat to peer at the console.

“Sounds smart,” he shrugs.

It has been awkward for the two of them ever since that night.

Clarke hadn’t remembered everything that happened until Christmas evening. Throughout the day it started to creep up on her, giving her flashes in breadcrumbs. And then once it finally came back to her, Clarke had no idea how to handle herself around him.

She couldn’t let herself so much as touch her hand to his without flinching away. Disjointed promises of ‘you are everything’ branded into everything she saw, each time she closed her eyes.

Bellamy wasn’t acting shifty, or uncomfortable, but he’s definitely been weird; not daring to meet her eyes in the moments of tepid quiet.

And she misses him. Misses what they have.

She doesn’t wish that the night never happened, but it seems that the fleeting moment of pure and unadulterated want has brought with it more trouble than it was worth.

This is the closest they’ve been in days, with his breath hovering into her ear, mellowed.

“Are we leaving today?” he asks, to no one in particular.

“There’s no reason not to,” Octavia shrugs, her voice sober.

“Then I’ll help you with the bags,” Clarke answers.

It’s pretty clear that it’s going to be a sober goodbye. This house provided them with a shelter when they needed it more than anything else.

O probably wouldn’t have made it through the storm in the state she had been in, so the cottage technically saved her life.

And it gave them so much more than they needed at the same time.

It gave them so many nights of freedom, of easy and effortless talk. Although the number of days they had here were limited, they felt infinite.

It felt like it could have lasted forever. Like in another world, another set of responsibilities, they could have settled down here and they would have been happy doing just that: in their own little family.

No one addresses the matter that they’ll never find this place again because it hurts a little too much to say a definite goodbye.

They’ll all do it in their own way.

Clarke thanks the house for giving her one night to channel every little ounce of desire that she’s had for the man next to her into something strung so high with potential that she couldn’t quite reach it.

She thanks the house for giving them a Christmas that she will cherish. One that, while it was filled with a teeny bit of awkwardness, has probably been one of the best ones she’s ever had.

When they drive away, barely reaching twenty miles an hour, Clarke says goodbye from the driver’s seat, and she hopes to God that that Monopoly set stays the way it is: in the closet under the stairs, for the rest of forever.

 

…

 

“Come on Clarke,” Octavia mumbles, days later from where she is laid back, feet on the dashboard.

She’s been driving for half a week.

Murphy announced that he can drive stick the day they left but with only one hand operating, they didn’t really have a choice.

Raven decided that when Clarke stops driving, they’ll be okay because she can just take the wheel and Murphy can use his only spare arm to control the gear stick.

Clarke brushed them off though, because now she can taste Vancouver on her tongue, in her lungs.

But Octavia has got a point because this is the fourth time that Clarke has almost fallen asleep in the driver’s seat, her head rolling forward dangerously.

The other three are in the back of the truck, taking watch from behind.

“You need to rest,” she whispers through a yawn.

She’s been driving fourteen hours a day, but she’s also been taking most of the watch shifts so that the others can get some sleep after being on the lookout all day.

“I’m fine, Octavia,”

Her argument is defeated when she has to pause to yawn mid-sentence, infected by Octavia’s.

“It’s cool. We can park up for the night a bit earlier and relax. You need it Clarke,”

“I don’t need anything,”

“Clarke, what have we said about being a martyr,” Raven chimes as she climbs out of the back of the truck, jumping out before Murphy awkwardly follows.

They open the door to Clarke’s side and practically tug her out of her seat, so that she lands unsteady on her feet.

She notices that Bellamy has stayed in the cargo bed and braces herself for the conversation to follow. She’s managed to avoid him thus far and had been wondering how long it would take for the others to get sick of them both acting weird around one another.

The other three hop out of the car and scatter into the dimmed evening, wandering off probably to get some firewood.

Clarke lifts herself, with ease, over the edge of the pick-up, already stumbling with the fatigue.

“We shouldn’t be stopping,” she mutters, more to herself, praying that whatever they’re about to say to each other won’t involve any references to how much of a fool she made of herself that night.

Bellamy turns his head, a bit surprised about how easy it was to convince her to get some rest.

“Hey,” she gruffs out.

Dropping herself down without an ounce of grace, Clarke punches her pack so that it might make a more comfortable pillow.

“Princess,” he greets, his voice barely above a whisper as he turns from his watch position and wriggles over to where she’s laid.

Bellamy takes his time to decide how to sit, but seemingly falls into the natural position of watching over her, back slumped against the divide in the truck as she sprawls out flat across the bed.

The stars are out tonight. Good, she thinks. They deserve tonight.

Clarke turns on her back to watch them, and his head hovers over hers, about a foot between them, him leaning over her like they did the night he forgave her.

“Things don’t have to be awkward between us,” she says when her eyes start to drift shut, another wave of tiredness washing over her with the first blink.

Clarke should be worried that she hasn’t got much of a filter right now, but she’s too tired to care.

“Not if we don’t want them to be,”

He makes a sound, shifts a bit uncomfortably, and then sighs.

She knows he’s reaching for his hair the same way she knows he’s got his lips clamped together in thought.

“So you remember,”

His voice comes out thick, and more transparent than he’s spoken to her since that night.

Clarke squeezes her eyes closed tighter, questioning what on Earth he’s talking about.

“What?”

“I thought you’d forgotten,” he mumbles, sounding guilty for some reason. She can hear him scratching his neck, the sound sending shivers through her spine.

She opens her eyes.

He’s watching her, eyes burning into hers with intimacy like nothing on that night. Because they are both stark sober right now, and they can’t hide whatever they say beneath the blanket of moonshine.

“Um…” she stutters, blinking under him. “No.”

Bellamy nods his head, looking away, throat bobbing.

He shrugs.

“That shit was pretty heavy,”

“It was,” Clarke agrees. “I don’t regret it though,”

His head snaps to the side a bit at that and Clarke stills, realizing what it must have sounded like.

“The, um, the drinking,”

He swallows again, like he’s bracing himself for something.

“And the other part?” his voice catches on nothing.

Clarke takes the time to consider it: this is something she has no idea whether or not to be honest about. She can see his eyes orbiting her like celestial spheres. If she tells him the truth, then there is no going back. If she tells him a lie, then she’s going to break.

“I don’t want things to be awkward,” she decides, closing her eyes again.

“Then they don’t have to be,” Bellamy pushes immediately.

And then something settles over the two of them, an agreement of sorts because there is nothing more to say.

Well, there is everything more to say. But they can’t if they don’t want things to change, and Clarke doesn’t.

She’s too sleepy.

“You look tired,” he whispers lowly.

She opens her eyes again, and chokes on a laugh in surprise. He’s smiling too, timidly.

“Gee,” she murmurs, kicking at his shin. “Thanks.”

He’s got his arm at the top of her bag, leaning on to his forearm so that he’s hovering properly over her now, forming a sort of shield with a lot less than a foot between them.

It’s like now that they are back to what they were, he doesn’t want to drift any further away than right next to her, scared that they might lose it once more.

It’d only take one small raise of her hand to pull his neck down, to close the space between them. To taste him.

“I’m trying to say you should get some sleep,” he grumbles, still trying to deny the looming grin.

Clarke had let her hair down when she rested her head on to her pack, so that it could fan out instead of painfully imprinting itself into her skull. Bellamy’s fingers are dancing carefully through the tips of it, like he doesn’t recognize he’s doing it at all.

 _He doesn’t dance,_ she smirks to herself. _sure he doesn’t._

“I don’t want to sleep,” she whispers, shifting her body towards him in a way he might not notice.

Now that she’s in a position in which she can blame her state of unconsciousness on however much she leans in towards him, sleep threatens to take over her every part.

“Griffin,” he warns, fond.

“Fine,” Clarke sighs back, giving up to his warmth. She rolls even further into him, so that he’s sheltering her everywhere, her forehead brushing his chest.

His arm hovers awkwardly by his side, threatening to reach out but cowering still.

She wants him to hold her. She’s glad he knows he can’t.

“But only if you tell me a story,” she grins, hiding it in his shirt.

Bellamy breathes heavily as a laugh.

“What do you want to hear?”

She lifts up a hand and raises her head so that she can replace the bag with his arm, knowing that the muscle of his bicep will be so much more comfortable.

He responds naturally, palm reaching around so that he can still play with the tips of her curls.

She lets her finger trail over his heart, marking a cross over and over and over.

“Something true?” she asks.

It’s probably not what he expects to hear, because he knows she isn’t asking for the stars, she honestly couldn’t give a fuck about them right now.

Bellamy hums, thinking, and she keeps drawing over his chest, marking a thousand promises so that he doesn’t have to make them.

“I’m scared to see my mother again,” he says to her finally. “I mean, I can’t think of much else better. But at the same time…”

“You’re worried she won’t have changed?” Clarke asks, softening.

“She used to sleep with guys for money,” he rushes, pain lilting his voice.

She asked for honesty. She didn’t expect this. Not at all. He’s trusting her with his biggest secret now. She’d always managed to catch the way him and Octavia spoke about their Mom, always picking up on the faint trace of… not shame, but something they clearly couldn’t stomach addressing. The words he uses aren’t what surprises Clarke: it’s who he’s telling them to.

He chokes out a noise, something like a laugh but it’s without humor. It sounds more relieved than anything else.

“I don’t think I’ve ever actually said that out loud.” Clarke hears herself make a sound but isn’t really sure what it means. He must hear something in it because he takes it as his opportunity to carry on. “I get why she did it, but that doesn’t mean that it hurt me any less. Each time one of those scumbags knocked on our door, it made me sick to my stomach. Every single one of them made me feel weaker than I ever was, like a little boy who couldn’t do _anything_ to protect his family.”

“That’s why you had to hide Octavia under the floorboards?” she says, voice melting.

She feels his chin nod against her head.

“She’d come out the next morning with bruises everywhere and she’d make us blueberry pancakes like it was nothing,”

God, he’s hurting.

She pinches at Bellamy’s t-shirt, and he brings his arm around her, clutching at her back like she knows he needs to.

“She was the strongest person I know, but at the same time she’s the weakest… and it took me so long to work out where that left us,”

“Why are you telling me this?” Clarke asks after she lets that settle.

He takes even longer to respond. She can picture him biting at his lip.

And then he answers her, raw.

“Because she’s not the strongest person I know anymore,”

Clarke would guess that he isn’t talking about just one specific person if it weren’t for the way he squeezes her: his fingertips pleading for her to hear what he’s trying to say.

She almost lets out a sob when she realizes that he’s referring to her.

And if he really does think that highly of her, then it’s time to live up to that. She wants to be good enough.

“Bellamy,” she whispers, raising her face to look him in the eye.

There is a tear balancing just at the corner of his golden-brown iris and Clarke places her hand underneath it, reassuring him that if he needs to let it fall then she’ll catch it. Without hesitation.

“I get that that was impossible for you, but what we’re going through now…” she stops when he squeezes his eyes shut momentarily, the single drop leaking out. She swipes it away with her thumb. “There’s not time to hold something like that against her.”

Her hand slides under his jaw, forcing him to hold her gaze.

“She’s still alive,”

“We don’t know that,”

“Okay,” she thinks, scolding herself for being so foolish. “There’s a chance that she’s still alive,” she corrects.

Clarke takes a second to keep her voice steady, preparing herself to plead.

“Don’t waste that,”

“I can’t forget what she did,” Bellamy sucks in a huge breath of air, shaking his head fervently.

“But you can remember why she did it. Because you two were more important to her than anything,”

“She ruined herself,” he chokes out again, another tear running away from his eyes.

“Maybe. But you of all people know that we have to go to the extremes to protect the people we love. There isn’t room to pick and choose how we do that,”

He looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time. Really actually seeing her.

It takes him a while, but eventually he breathes in slowly, releases it, and then smiles so softly.

“Sorry,” he practically laughs- it would be laughing if it weren’t so full of emotion. “You’re meant to be sleeping. I am not trying to throw myself a pity party.”

“I’m glad you trusted me,” she whispers to him, not able to say anything more.

“Then will you do me a favor?”

He asks it as he lifts his chin to tuck her head under his jaw, forcing her to fall into his neck.

“Get some rest Clarke,”

She smiles.

And she presses her lips to his skin. Not as a kiss, never as a kiss. As a touch.

“Sure Bell,”

He holds her to him the same way he holds her every time he can.

It really doesn’t take long before Clarke starts to drift away, to let go and rest.

But she doesn’t succumb to sleep before she feels it: the first kiss he has ever given her. Pressed just once to her crown, to the top of her forehead, to the skin that felt dead before he touched her like that.

He kisses her, closed mouth and kind of dry but pushing her head into his lips like a confession.

She’s scared of his confession.

 

…

 

Clarke wakes up hours later, breeze picking up as the night rolls on, and she is encompassed in Bellamy’s arms.

She wakes up feeling better than she has in weeks, knowing that she won’t sleep another night like this unless she spends it exactly like the way she is, being held by the man she has come to trust more than anything.

He’s snoring softly.

She pulls away as gentle as she can, smiling at the way Bellamy whimpers in his sleep, clutching his hands stronger to her back to keep her where she is.

Clarke settles for wriggling up higher, so that now he isn’t just holding her, she’s holding him too. After he told her something like that, after he laid his heart bare like that, Clarke can’t just settle for him being the one to shelter her. She needs to shelter him as well.

With one hand under his neck, and the other resting gently on his forehead, Clarke starts to stroke her fingers through his hair, combing back every damn curl on his head.

The first coo that he lets out sounds like a song, he’s stricken with sleep and Clarke watches as his face relaxes even more.

She does it again, her nails grazing against his scalp and he purrs.

“Clarke,” a voice sounds from the opposite corner of the cargo bed.

She ignores Raven in favor of watching the way Bellamy’s face changes as she scratches a little deeper.

“Clarke,” Raven tries again.

Clarke closes her eyes, breathing coolly into Bellamy’s eyebrow before she turns awkwardly to look to her friend.

She doesn’t miss the way he follows her, head almost falling to lay on her chest.

“Raven?” she asks, voice hoarse from sleep.

“You’re okay, Clarke,” she answers. “You’re okay,”

“I’m scared,” her words catch, choking out, and she can’t keep her eyes from him for any longer than that.

“I know,”

She’s still looking at Bellamy, but she can feel Raven’s scrutiny from all the way at the other end of the truck.

She moves to sit up all the way, and his head falls on to her lap, a sigh barely escaping his lips as he settles.

She keeps combing her way through his hair, almost clinging to it.

Octavia has fallen asleep on Murphy’s shoulder in the front seat, heads like a tepee as they rumble the truck with their snores.

“I thought you knew about us sleeping together,”

Her voice breaks the calm like a knife to the gut, but Clarke has been thinking about this conversation ever since she found out.

She’s not mad at Raven, not at all. She just needs to know.

“I guess I never made the connection,”

Raven nods.

“We’ve never thought of each other like that. It was two good-looking people who got drunk and had a one-night stand. Nothing more,”

“Raven,” Clarke warns, needing her to know that she doesn’t mind.

“I just don’t want you to…”

“Don’t want me to what?”

“He isn’t Finn,”

“He is nothing like Finn,” Clarke snorts. “And me and him aren’t fucking,”

Raven doesn’t say anything else. She knows when enough is enough.

 

…

 

“Chandler and Rachel would have been perfect together and you know it,”

The next morning, they let themselves lie in. Bellamy is still asleep, has been for hours, and Clarke is still massaging his head, comforting every crease in his forehead out.

Murphy and Octavia have been arguing for at least a half hour, with Clarke and Raven listening in amusedly, not daring to intervene.

“That’s a riot,” Murphy groans, rubbing his hand across his face.

The two of them had both launched themselves into the cargo bed as soon as they woke up, both a bit frazzled after waking up so close to each other.

“Clarke?” Octavia pleads, turning to her as though her life depends on winning this argument.

“Nuh uh, you two can leave me the hell out of this one,”

“Oh come on,” Murphy sighs.

She shrugs, grinning again.

“I always liked Joey and Rachel,”

Even Raven makes a sound, face scrunching up in reaction.

“What? He knew her better than anyone else,” she defends, suddenly feeling like she’s being prosecuted.

Bellamy shifts, groaning loud enough for everyone to hear.

Nobody had said anything when they saw the way the two of them were lying, knowing that now is definitely not the time if the way he is holding her back is anything to go by.

When he starts to grumble though, all eyes fall to him and the way he wraps his hand further around Clarke’s waist like she’s a cuddly toy.

“Will you guys give it a rest? Some of us are trying to sleep,”

Clarke’s hand stills at how wrecked his voice sounds and she realizes that he must know now how much she’s clinging to him.

“Some of us are busy discussing the _important_ matters of life, Bellamy,” Octavia rolls her eyes, lingering only for a second on the intertwined pair.

“Shh,” he mumbles into Clarke’s stomach.

Clarke feels her ears burning but is thankful that no one says anything.

 

…

 

Raven snatches Murphy away a while later, muttering something about stretching their legs.

Octavia stays, unpacking her bag and folding her clothes up silently.

That is, until she clears her throat, still looking to her last few possessions when she starts.

“He told you about our mother,”

She sounds strong, like she has accepted something long ago. Clarke doesn’t know if it is her mother’s career or the fact that he was going to tell her. Either way, Octavia sounds like she knows everything.

“He did,” she nods, eyes dropping down to him inevitably.

“Good,” she smiles sadly.

Clarke keeps nodding, understanding the weight of their secret.

“He hasn’t told anyone before,”

“He said,” Clarke agrees.

“I’m sorry about your own Mom,”

Her head flashes up to Octavia, unsure what to think.

“He told you?”

“No,” she shrugs. “I guessed.”

Clarke gapes for a moment, then shuts her mouth.

“Oh. It’s okay. I’ve still got family,”

Octavia surveys her.

It feels more important than any conversation they’ve ever had. It feels like an acceptance of something more. Something that lasts.

“Yeah. You do,”

 

…

 

They set off around midday, with Bellamy slouching his feet across the dashboard as Clarke takes to the wheel.

She doesn’t really have time to think while she’s driving, having to navigate across winding country roads that are barely wide enough to fit the pick-up through.

They encounter a walker, the first since arriving to the cottage, but Octavia shoots it down.

It’s sat in a car that had run into a tree and become totaled. Raven breaks into it and steals a tank of gas and a few stale bottles of water.

She’s taken back to the radio, having moved on from her first accomplishment and she’s motivated to fix the second.

It’s a quiet day: routine and one that they’re probably going to forget after this is all over.

Bellamy says something about needing to get out of the damn truck for a few hours, and Murphy mentions that they’re running low on water again.

So Clarke slows them down to listen out for some running water and they find it at dusk.

The girls offer to set up a fire, already missing the warmth it constantly provided, and the guys go to get some water from the river, parked ten feet away from the truck.

No-one sees Murphy topple in, a wrong step or a quick stumble, but he makes a splash that ricochets across the clearing and their heads snap to him like meerkats.

With a broken arm, there is no way that he is going to be able to swim and the winter current is way too strong for him to fight back.

Clarke starts to run to him, but Bellamy has also dived straight in, and is practically hurling the injured man back on to the riverbank before she can so much as find him in the waves.

She runs to Murphy, and he’s rolling about on the grass in agony, his face torn apart.

She catches his shoulders in her hands and holds him still as he tries to writhe around in pain.

Bellamy climbs out of the river and starts stripping off straight away so that he won’t have to sit in his wet gear and risk getting ill.

Clarke doesn’t even have time to notice, because she is too busy checking over Murphy’s arm and trying to assess the damage done to it.

It is fucked. All of the healing that has been done has been revoked and his arm looks just like it did when they found him.

“What the fuck did you do?” she mutters, wiping the wet hair away from his face.

Raven and Octavia set about to take his layers off, already noticing that he’s shaking uncontrollably.

“You’re okay,” Raven says when she takes her own jacket off and throws it on to his chest.

They carry him over to the fire, Octavia and Clarke pausing to make sure Bellamy is okay.

He brushes them off without hesitation, and spends the following hour helping out with whatever they need.

After Murphy has warmed up, and Clarke has reset his arm- not without having to make him cry out, they can make it into much more of a joke, all unwilling to admit that the fall shook them.

Raven manages to think of about a thousand different names that can translate to idiot in some way or another, and she has no worries about voicing that.

Clarke is the one reluctant to laugh along, too busy preoccupied with how Bellamy had jumped straight in after him.

It’s just another item to add to the list of reasons why he is most probably the best man she has ever met.

And it hurts.

 

…

 

They’ve stopped deciding who is going to take watch. The truck has given them a certain amount of leeway, so it’s just whoever is up.

Bellamy clearly can’t sleep right now because he’d slept so deeply into the day this morning.

Clarke decides to ask him to teach her how to shoot. Why not? What have they got to lose?

He seems like a pretty natural shot, if the way he holds his gun like he’s got a third arm is anything to go by.

“You’re a natural with that thing, huh?” she shrugs, kicking a log closer to him as she crowds around the fire.

He levels with her, smile already gracing his expression when he sees her.

Clarke feels him watching her while she looks to the fire, gaze amused.

“I guess,” Bellamy answers, bumping her shoulder with his in greeting. “I don’t like shooting, though.”

“You want to give me some lessons?”

He laughs before he considers her.

“I’d say you’re pretty set,” he gestures over to her bow, how it is slung by her knee.

“Oh, come on Bell,” she sighs and rolls her eyes dramatically, ignoring his scoff. “I’m bored. We’re safe,”

He watches her, eyes unreadable. She hates this, not knowing what he’s thinking.

If he didn’t look so content, she’d be worried.

“Alright Princess, but you’re going to have to return the favor someday.”

Bellamy gets to his feet and brushes his legs off, kicking at the backs of his boots.

He takes her hand in his before he even realizes what he’s doing.

She doesn’t mind, not one bit.

He takes her to a tree a bit of a way from camp, and hands her his gun like it’s nothing.

“So I hold it like this?” she asks him, trying her best not to be embarrassed about how bad at this she is.

She holds it to her shoulder and looks through the sight like she’s seen him do before.

“A bit higher,” he says as he comes up behind her and places him arm around her back.

He’s bracing her, guiding her, and his voice is sweet and low in her ear.

She hides her face into the sight of the gun, trying to find a target in the shadows.

“You never done this before?” he asks, trembling.

“I have. I’ve never been any good at it.”

He breathes next to her, steady into her ear because now that he’s gotten this close again, he’s not going to step away easily.

He’s waiting for her to make a move but for her own sanity, she wants him to hold her for a while longer.

“Take the shot, Clarke,” he laughs.

She fires. She hears a bullet sink its way into a nearby tree and she laughs, almost dropping the gun in surprise that she did it.

“See?” he chuckles. “You might be a natural too,”

“Yeah, well I might just have a good teacher,” she stutters out.

A shiver wriggles its way down her spine, and he moves closer, cupping her.

“You cold?” he whispers to her cheek.

This is dangerous. They’ve had too many close calls, way too many.

She’s dangling him right in front of herself and she won’t let the string snap. His face slides against hers, gentle, but just as intimate as that night.

His chest is pressed to her back.

“No,” she answers and pushes back into him, letting him catch her.

“You nervous?”

His other arm comes around to her elbow, lifting the gun just a bit higher.

“I feel alive,” she admits, lowering the gun to her side and turning in his arms to face him.

He’s still watching her with glowing eyes, and his hands come around to hold her at her waist.

“Good,” he whispers when his gaze falls to her mouth, focused and determined.

Clarke looks at him because it’s something she’ll never get tired of doing.

She drops the gun clumsily; probably not a good idea considering she hasn’t turned the safety on, and yet he doesn’t care.

Both hands land at his neck, rubbing words and secrets into his skin in a caress she’ll never take back.

“I still can’t believe you remember,” he admits, holding her so that there is still some space between them.

He’s giving her a way out of this, but she can’t take it yet.

“Remember what?”

Clarke knows what he means, of course she does. He’s smiling, only a little wryly.

“I know for a fact that you know what I’m talking about,”

“Yeah but making you say stuff is my way of having fun,”

“You ever gonna quit trying to be a smartass? I’ve heard it makes shit a lot easier,”

“Please, you love my smartass,”

It’s not meant to come out like that, she didn’t mean to say that word. She stills and hopes he doesn’t notice but he doesn’t really react.

Bellamy clicks his teeth, smiles boyishly, bobs his head like he’s thinking about what he should say.

“Do you want to talk about Vancouver?” he asks.

His ears are burning red and Clarke knows why. He doesn’t want to talk about _Vancouver_ , he wants to talk about what is going to happen there. He wants to talk about what is going to happen between them.

“I don’t think I can, Bellamy,”

“Okay,” he says, accepting, before he changes tact.

“Are we going to talk about the unspoken thing?”

God, he’s being so blunt that she has no idea what to do. She squeezes at his neck, feeling it move tense between her fingers.

She pulls her hips to meet his, needing to feel him.

“What unspoken thing?”

He scoffs.

“You’re a lot of things, Griffin, but you aren’t thick,”

He’s pulling at the chord between them, holding it between his teeth like a rose.

“Come on, Clarke. What are you waiting for?”

She pulls his forehead to hers and tries to tell him everything she can’t say out loud through the link between their contact.

“Bellamy,” she warns, pleading with him. Her voice is more vulnerable than the fact that they are standing here defenseless. “Don’t tell me something,”

“Why not?” He has lost his smile but he’s not angry.

“Because this is hurting,”

“I’m hurting you?” and now he sounds like he’s breaking, raw.

“Yes, Bellamy. And I’m going to hurt you,”

“I’m a big boy, Clarke. I can take care of myself,” he smirks, like it’s all a joke, but his voice is one hundred percent serious.

His fist curls into the fabric of her shirt, underneath the layers of fleece and waterproof.

“But you can’t do that if you’re taking care of me too,”

They are standing like they’re about to take to a waltz. _He doesn’t dance_.

“That’s… I didn’t…”

“It’s okay, Bell,” she shrugs, needing him to accept that they can’t address whatever this is between them.

“But I want to talk about that night,” he asserts, pinching at her back, pulling her even more flush towards him.

“See?” she winks, trying to make things light again. “I got you to say it,”

He rolls his eyes fondly before he moves in closer, face set because he’s not going to lose this one now.

Bellamy brushes his nose against hers, radiating warmth and smugness that Clarke can taste.

He hovers his lips so near to hers that when he talks, his words stroke the corner of her mouth.

“You remember,”

“What made you think I wouldn’t?” she exasperates. His eyes ghost shut when she breathes against him.

“You acted like nothing happened,” he says, confused like he’s trying to add everything up. “For days and days, Clarke,”

She bites her lip to slow herself down, to take her time with her answer.

“I thought you might want me to forget,” she admits, gaze dropping to his boots.

His fingers shift from her back and he raises a hand to her jaw, so that he can tug softly at the vice of her bite, just like he did that night.

She releases her lip from her teeth and tries so hard not to make a single move as he brushes his thumb against the chapped edge of her mouth, delicate to a point where she has to wonder if she’s dreaming.

“Now why would I want that?”

“You were drunk,” she shrugs.

“ _You_ were drunk,” he repeats it like it’s the chorus of a song, the corners of his lips lilting. “And it might not have been smart, but I don’t…”

He breathes, composes himself.

“I wanted.” Is all he finishes with.

“And that is why this is so dangerous, Bellamy,” Clarke sighs, her voice breaking just the way his eyes do. “Because we aren’t children.”

She pulls herself away from his touch before she can take anything back, leaving him to pick up his gun without another word.

If a tear falls down her cheek as she stomps away from the camp- because she can’t go back there right now- then no one is here to see it.

He promised he wouldn’t break her. This is just her helping him keep that promise.

He’ll realize that once he gets over how pissed off he is. She can hear it in his sigh, the way he blows outwardly, steam practically erupting from his ears.

She basically just rejected him, after his mouth was so close to hers. She wants him too. She’ll accept that now.

Clarke wants him more than anything. Wants to know how gentle he’ll hold her, how rough he’ll kiss her, how sincere he’ll fuck her.

And she can’t have him.

He can be mad at her all he wants, because it’ll be better for him to be a little pissed now, if it saves him from being hurt later on.

She stalks away from camp on tiptoes to stop the noise from spreading.

She’s forgotten to take her bow, but right now Clarke doesn’t care. She just needs some space.

If he knows what’s good for them both, then he’ll leave her alone.

Clarke is about to throw herself down to a dry patch of grass when she hears a noise. A hum of sorts.

It’s coming from nearby, close enough that if it is a walker then she’s about to be in trouble.

She won’t run. That’s not who she is. She won’t lead it back to camp so she walks forward just that bit further.

But she is halted by what she sees.

Because this isn’t just one, and they aren’t anything like walkers.

What she sees, is her best friend held up against a tree, sheltered by the man that she is currently making out with like there is nothing else in the world, humming into each other’s mouths like they are whispering prayers.

Clarke doesn’t know what to do. If she should announce herself or not.

It’s so much more than a knife to the gut, seeing Raven and Murphy kissing each other with no shame.

Because she knew that there was something brewing, but she thought Raven might at least have had the decency to tell her about this.

She’d spent so much time trying to get Clarke to spill about whatever was between her and Bellamy, and at the same time she’s been going at it with Murphy like this?

And if that’s what Clarke’s not really mad about then she’ll shove every other instinct straight down.

Because the two of them have made this look so easy. They’ve made it look like boy meets girl, girl meets boy, they shove each other up against a tree and make out like teenagers, and the rest is a fairy tale.

Well that’s not fair.

It’s just not fair.

Why should she have to deprive herself of everything that Bellamy is, out of duty, out of responsibility. And the two of them can’t even wait until they get to a safe place? Until they get to Vancouver?

And not to mention, until Raven reaches the man that has been pining after her for years, for the better part of their lives. Clarke knows that that wasn’t one sided. Clarke _knows_ that the idea that Wells is alive, is what has been keeping Raven going.

She is happy that they’ve found Murphy. But this just isn’t fair.

If they want to have their fun then Clarke will let them have it. Have all the fun they want.

She’ll go back to camp and do what she’s been doing this whole Goddamn time: keeping her shit together.

She falls asleep in Octavia’s lap, ignoring Bellamy as she stomps into camp.

He might look up at her and glare in that cutting Bellamy Blake way, but she doesn’t care. She’s tired and if Raven and Murphy have so much energy then they can spend it on something useful like taking watch.

She falls asleep angry, knowing that most of her anger is directed at herself and at the world she’s living in now.

And that only makes her more angry, because she can’t do anything about it.

 

…

 

Clarke drives for forty hours straight the next day, alone in the front seat after managing to convince everyone that they’ll get a lot more rest in the cargo bed.

She can feel them muttering about her, all of them recognizing that she’s pushing twice as hard today.

And she doesn’t care. They can think whatever the hell they want.

She pushed Bellamy away because she’s scared to care too much. She feels like she’s lined with ick after stumbling in on Raven and Murphy, hating that she had to find out about the two of them in the most uncomfortable way possible.

Hating that she can feel that Wells is close, and yet she can’t even be sure that he’s not just another one of the infected.

Raven tries to take the passenger seat in the morning, but Clarke shrugs her off and tells her that she needs some time to think, because it’s true.

It takes one look for Raven to understand that she knows. That she’s hurt. And so Raven gives her what she needs, mentioning something about how they’re going to have to talk later.

Clarke can deal with later. Right now she just needs to find a way to drive across the country without hitting a roadblock, or without totaling the truck.

They’re not covering good enough ground, because nearly all of the routes lead somehow to the highways, or city lanes that are clogged up already.

And they’re having to go as slow as possible in order to keep the noise levels down.

When they start to run dangerously low on gas, Clarke contemplates offering to just ditch the truck, knowing that, pessimistically, it’s probably not saving them more time than it is worth.

But Raven worked on this thing for weeks, and even if she is pissed right now, Clarke wouldn’t do that to her.

They are travelling through the back alley of a small suburb, dodging bags of rotting garbage, when the gas tank tells her that it is empty.

She parks the car, slams the door a little too hard when she gets out, and pulls herself over the lip of the cargo bed.

“Why have we stopped?” Octavia asks, wiping the sleep out of her eyes having just woken up.

There are no streetlights up this alley, so they should be pretty covered at least for long enough to talk game plan.

“We’re out of gas,” Clarke tells them, shrugging down next to Murphy, as far from Bellamy as she can get.

He has his lips clamped together, like he’s disgusted, like he can’t even take in a breath around her.

Ouch.

“Shit,”

“Yeah, pretty much,”

“What do you want to do?” Raven asks, scratching her forehead to try and get the gears in her head moving.

“What is there to do? We knew this might happen surely?”

“We keep the truck,” Bellamy says, avoiding Clarke’s eye. “It’s saving energy that we need,”

“Then we’ve got to find a gas station and soon, Bellamy,” Octavia says, concern lacing her voice.

Clarke rolls her shoulders out, reaching around to rub out the crick that is starting to form.

“It doesn’t make sense for all five of us to go,” he mutters, fidgeting into the middle so that he can talk through the plan of action a bit easier.

Clarke curls up instinctively, scared to even graze her knee against his.

“I thought you didn’t want to split up?” Raven asks.

“I didn’t know that we’d be in this situation,”

“Bell’s right. Too many of us going is just going to bring unwanted attention. We want to lay low,”

“Then who decides who goes, O?”

Raven looks between the lot of them: they all know that Murphy isn’t an option, and he knows that too because he’s already disengaged from the conversation, or pretending to be at least.

Everyone has picked up on how Bellamy and Clarke have put some space between themselves. Not that there is a drastic change, but they aren’t touching each other at every moment they can.

Clarke guesses that gives it away.

Not that she was ever going out of her way to touch him, it just kind of… happened.

“That depends on how many of us are staying,”

So it’s between the four of them.

Clarke knows that she shouldn’t volunteer to go straight away. After Nebraska, she knows that recklessness is only going to drive a wedge between the lot of them.

She’ll go though; she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to keep her sanity if she has to stay in this truck.

“I’ll go alone,” Bellamy breaks the silence, and he bites his lip as he does so, in preparation for the onslaught.

They all snap their heads to him, and Murphy bursts out into a fit of snickers. _That_ is how outrageous his comment is.

“Like fuck are you going on your own,” Clarke snaps.

He curls his lip, like he’s about to retaliate with just as much heat, then he thinks better of it and shrugs.

“It makes sense,”

It’s Raven’s turn to start laughing, humorlessly.

“Do enlighten us,”

“You guys will be safer here,” he says as though it’s obvious.

“And if you die out there,” Clarke starts, “None of us would know,”

“Then you give me a time limit, and if I’m not back by then, you leave on foot,” he argues, rising now that she’s lost her temper.

Awkwardness be damned, she isn’t going to let him be a martyr.

“Without me,”

“Have you taken something?” Murphy asks, beneath his breath so that only Clarke picks up on it.

“I’m not doing this,” Bellamy says as he stands and jumps out of the truck, throwing his pack to the cobbles like he’s about to take off.

“Bellamy, I’m telling you, if you do something stupid, I swear to God I’ll kill you,” Octavia warns him.

Raven wriggles over to the other end of the truck so she can grab Bellamy’s bag and bring it back over.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she says, trying to hold back another laugh, incredulous.

“I’m helping,”

This is getting out of hand and fast. Clarke can only sit and gape at the whole scene, the war in her head trying to convince her that this is just a dream: that he wouldn’t be so foolish as to do something like this.

“Getting yourself killed is not helping us,”

“It’s stopping you lot from getting yourselves killed though,”

He’s losing his patience, and even his sister isn’t getting through to him. This feels like a ticking time bomb; the clock is running faster than Clarke can count the seconds in her head and so she does all she knows to do:

“Bell,” she whispers, softer than she’s spoken to him since last night. Everything that she pushed down coming back through the chord between them and racing down it faster than a lightening shock.

He stops walking around the truck, frozen still in his tracks. He doesn’t look at her, but all she needs is for him to calm down and think this through.

He doesn’t move, hand on the lip of the back of the truck so Clarke tries again.

“Bellamy,”

He lifts his head and spins around to meet her eyes. She crawls towards where he is standing, placing her hand over his to keep it there. His fingers flinch when hers find them, twitching and telling him to take the hand off the car. She doesn’t let him follow that instinct.

“Think about what you’re asking us to do,” she says for him.

When he looks at his boots confused, and only confused, no longer determined to run, Clarke carries on.

“If any one of us were trying to do what you are, you’d be hitting the roof right now,”

Bellamy opens his mouth, but no words come out.

“Get back in the truck Bell,” she begs, and it takes him a moment. One filled with nothing but the sounds of street rats scampering through the alley, and Clarke stays perched on the tips of her toes, rocking forward until he nods, and reluctantly swings himself over like it’s just a step and not a five foot lift off the ground.

“Ground rules,” Octavia says as he settles in uncomfortably, looking like she’s having to try with every ounce of strength she’s got inside her not to snap at him.

Their legs aren’t touching, no part of Clarke is daring to.

“We are going to come to a unanimous decision _before_ one of us even thinks about taking off. Any of us have a problem then we stay together,”

“Agreed?” Raven chirps, kicking Bellamy’s boot roughly.

He sighs, relents, and nods his head.

“Agreed.”                                

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Cradle me, I'll cradle you,'  
> \- Toothpaste Kisses, The Maccabees


	12. Do your best, destroy me

“I take it that we’re all happy to leave?” Raven asks, slouching down against the truck casually.

The four of them nod their heads and Murphy just sighs, knowing that he’s out of the running.

“I think only two of us need to go,” Octavia offers up. “There is no way that we’re sending just one, but anymore and we’re not going to be able to hide.”

“We might not need to hide if we’ve got Clarke,”

“Why’s that?” Clarke asks, ignoring the hope that blooms in her chest at the thought of being able to go.

“Your bow,” Raven shrugs as though it’s obvious. “It’s the only weapon we’ve got that doesn’t make a sound.”

“We can make do without it,” Bellamy shakes his head, decided.

Clarke turns to him, wondering why he’s so sure that they won’t need her.

“No, she’s right. Shooting a gun is always a risk if there is more than one walker around,”

“A risk I’d rather take,” he spells out.

“Than what?”

He doesn’t answer her, brushing her off as he turns to his sister, his eyes flashing panic in all directions frantically.

“Octavia, I know you want to do this,” he pleads. “But I’m asking you, as your brother, please don’t.”

“You give me a good reason Bell, and I won’t,” she decides, levelling him fairly.

He takes a moment to think, knowing that this is the only way to win her over.

“I’m a better shot,”

“But two people can go,”

“You’re still recovering,”

“Bullshit. I got one pathetic cold two weeks ago. Try again,”

Clarke can feel him start to lose his steady breathing, turning red at his ears.

“I made a _promise_ to get you home,” he snaps finally.

Octavia glares at him, unrelenting for a second that lasts a millennium, until the armored hold of her shoulders slouches and she gives in.

“Okay Bell,” she mumbles, and sounds torn between defeat and acceptance. “I’ll give you this one,”

He nods at her, face relaxing instantly with the knowledge that his sister is going to be safe.

“I’ll let the three of you fight this one out,” she smirks, squirming awkwardly over Raven’s outstretched legs to get to Murphy and holding her head on his shoulder to watch this like it’s a movie scene.

Clarke doesn’t say anything; she figures she’ll wait to see what Raven thinks.

“So I guess it’s me and you then Reyes,” Bellamy says through a heavy breath, sounding relieved.

Not. A. Chance.

Clarke’s head snaps to him, and she feels her face contort in surprise.

“What the hell?” she demands.

He looks at her tiredly, which only makes her more angry, because it’s like he can’t even be bothered to explain himself.

“I told you, it’s not a risk worth taking,”

She doesn’t get what he means so she barrels forward.

“Just because you think I can’t handle myself, does not mean you can just cut me out,” she snarls, shifting closer so that he can catch a hold of how pissed she is.

He watches her, poker face intact, and Clarke has never wanted to punch him more.

It takes him way too long to reply to her, but when he does, his lips are cold, his face is stone.

“That’s exactly what it means,”

It’s something Clarke would have expected him to say on the first day that they met, but never now. Not after everything they’ve been through, after everything that they’ve trusted each other with.

“Hey,” Octavia snaps, face hardening towards her brother. “Go easy,”

The brunette looks deadly; she knows that this is too far. Clarke knew that things would be awkward between the two of them, but she never would have thought that he’d put all of their safeties on the line just to stick it to her. Just to make her feel unneeded.

Murphy is looking between the lot of them, calculating, planning something.

“Bellamy, Raven was right about Clarke’s bow,” he says clearly.

Clarke looks to him in thanks, nodding in the way that their coded communications convey everything that needs to be said.

“No she wasn’t. I’m taking Raven,” he answers, just as icy as before.

“Hold up,” Raven pinches her eyebrows together and raises her hand to him. “Who’s to say me and Clarke won’t just go?”

Bellamy looks to her, shaken only beneath the surface before he regains his composure.

“Why do you guys need her to go that badly?” he asks incredulous.

“Because she’s our best bet,”

“Every other time we’ve been caught in the thick of it, she’s been…” he doesn’t finish, swallowing thickly before he carries on. Clarke tries to blank out what he finishes with, because she has been a number of things that might make someone want a partner who can hold herself with a lot more diplomacy. _Reckless, naïve, foolish_ are all words that spring to her mind and when Bellamy lands on one of his own, his voice still carries all the blame from him to her. “separated.”

They’re talking about her like she’s miles away, or like she’s just some deaf mute. Well she’s not. And Clarke reaches her breaking point the second he finishes his sentence, flushing away the guilt that creeps up on her in favor of fighting her corner.

No one expects her to shout, and it’s foolish beyond belief to do that, but whoever this is sat next to her, this isn’t the Bellamy that she knows.

“Hey!” her voice echoes through the alley and everyone startles to look at her. “I am not a dog to be kept on a leash. I’m not a toddler who needs to be left with a babysitter. I am not a liability. So don’t you dare treat me like one,”

She looks to him, letting her gaze harden to rock.

He keeps his face painfully neutral, lips pursed as he hears what she says. The only sign that he is actually recognizing her words stems from the way his eyes are glinting. Always glinting. Brimming over with emotion that Clarke has told him he can’t have.

“If I am the right person for this then you can’t stop me from going Bellamy. I am not your responsibility,”

She doesn’t give him any time to reply to her, knowing that whatever is about to come out of his mouth will be just another rebuttal.

“Raven, what do you think?” she asks, turning to her friend.

They can sort out whatever shit is between them when they are back on the road, when they aren’t stuck at the edge of a town that they don’t even know the name of, and when they have time to work through the miscommunication.

The brunette shrugs, smiling reverently at Clarke. A _that’s my best friend_ kind of smile. An _I’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth_ kind of smile.

“I think you’re the right person for this,” she nods, smirk widening, mirroring what Clarke said clumsily.

“So Clarke is definitely going?” Octavia asks, humming cautiously.

“You said it has to be unanimous,”

Bellamy’s voice is steady, scheming.

“So the only way that I’m going to agree to this is if I go too,”

There is a collective sigh: a community eye-roll if one were to ever exist, so Clarke keeps focused on Raven and raises her eyebrows to check if she’s okay with that.

Secretly, Clarke would much rather she go than Bellamy. She doesn’t trust herself around him right now, and she is pissed like hell at the way he was talking about her.

There is something else. Something else behind what he was saying, and she’ll get to the bottom of it eventually.

Raven looks only at her, reading her the way that has come naturally for years. Clarke knows that she has already forgiven Raven for whatever she is hiding about her and Murphy. She has her own reasons, and she is an adult. The first person that she goes to has always been Clarke; that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Her expression says everything.

“Clarke, come here,” Raven says as she stands.

When Octavia looks to her in warning, she holds her hand up in surrender.

“We’re just going to talk, O,”

They both jump out of the cargo bed wordlessly, and haul themselves into the front seats, kicking their feet up to the dashboard in sync.

Raven makes sure that the window divider is closed firmly shut so that the others can’t crane to hear them speak.

“I know you saw what happened the other night,” Raven smiles: delicate, apologetic.

“I did,” Clarke nods, not willing to lie to her friend.

“Are you mad because I didn’t tell you?”

“I thought that was why I was,”

“But?”

“But I figured that you’d tell me when you were ready,” Clarke levels her with a gaze that shows that she trusts her.

“I don’t know what we are doing, Clarke,” the brunette relents, throwing her neck back against the headrest. “He just, he makes me feel that bit more alive,”

“Yeah,” she nods, accepting.

“And we don’t know if we are ever going to see Wells again. I know how much that hurts, Clarke, trust me I do. Because I love him just as much as you do. And I don’t know what to do about any of it. I don’t know what I can,”

“It’s good Rae. I’m happy for you,”

“And for the record, that was our first kiss. We just, it just happened,”

Clarke pulls her in roughly by the shoulders and swings her arms around her neck before she says anything else. She gives herself just those few moments to hold Raven and Raven holds her back, squeezing tightly with her hands at her back.

“Now,” Raven says, face neutral again when they drift back face to face. “What the fuck did you do to Bellamy?”

“I’m not the one talking shit,”

“No but he’s been acting weird all day,”

“He’s Bellamy. He’s always weird,”

“True,” Raven scoffs, then changes tact. “This time yesterday he was looking at you like you hung the moon,”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Clarke says, rolling her eyes and ignoring the blush on her cheeks. Of course Raven would say that, even if it is a lie.

“You shut him down, didn’t you?” her voice is a whisper, masking the surprise barely.

“It’s not like that,”

“Clarke I’ve seen how you look at him too. I’ve never seen you like that with anyone,”

“I didn’t shut him down… because I walked away before we could even get to that point,”

It isn’t strictly true, but it’s not a lie.

“If you think for one second that that man is going to be able to bare us two going out there, then you are miles out,”

“He needs to stop acting like a child,”

“He’s not acting like a child, Clarke. He’s acting like he is scared to death of losing you,”

“He’s making me feel, Raven. I can’t fucking stand it. I’m going crazy with it,” she admits, looking to how she is twirling her fingers in her lap.

Raven takes her hands in hers, but doesn’t say anything as she rubs the awkwardness out of her wrists.

 

…

 

There’s a tap at the window and they are called out a while later.

Clarke is glad that they’ve managed to sort their shit out before they are separated. She’s probably too stubborn to admit that she wouldn’t have had the conversation until after she’d come back, if Clarke had had her way.

Although she’s had to let out something that she’d been reluctant to accept, once it’s out there it’s like she can kind of forget about it, for now at least.

When Clarke opens the door, Bellamy is slumped against the bonnet with his coat zipped up and his bag heavy on his back.

“You done?” he sighs, fiddling with the laces on his boots.

Clarke doesn’t answer him.

She walks around to the bed and takes her pack when Octavia hands it to her.

Slinging her quiver of arrows over her shoulder and picking up her bow from where she’d left it, Clarke steps over to Octavia and Murphy.

They are both looking cautious, a reluctant goodbye on their lips.

Octavia throws her arms around Clarke’s neck and holds her tight to her chest, rocking awkwardly over the wall of the cargo bed.

“I’ll see you soon,” O whispers in her ear.

Clarke pulls away and nods before she turns to Murphy.

“I hate to break it to you Griffin, but I’m not really much of a hugger,” he shrugs when he scoots over a bit further away, like he’s afraid she’s going to throw herself at him.

Clarke snorts, reaches to punch him in his good arm but he catches her forearm before she moves away.

“Stay safe, Clarke,” he mutters, void of emotion. “Don’t be an idiot.”

“I’ll try not to be,” she shrugs back, blinking a little too quickly when she steps away.

She buckles her bag at her chest and meets Raven around the other side of the truck.

“We’re going to kill each other,” Clarke mumbles and rolls her eyes, nodding over to the other side of the truck, blocked off by the towering roof.

Bellamy is talking to his sister but he’s still got that same sulk written across his face.

“As long as you don’t get eaten, I don’t mind.” Raven sighs and gives Clarke one last hug. “In and out, Clarke. Find a gas station, fill up, and get your ass back here by the morning.”

“How long are we getting?” Clarke asks, rubbing her nose into Raven’s shoulder.

“Bellamy said half a day should be enough. The three of us will set off around midday tomorrow if you aren’t back by then,”

Raven says it calmly, as though they aren’t talking about never seeing each other again. Always the diplomat.

“You’re taking this surprisingly well,”

“That’s because I know you’re going to be here,”

There’s nothing else to say. Clarke doesn’t want to ruin it by saying anything that doesn’t need to be put out there.

Bellamy doesn’t meet her eyes when she jogs over to him.

“You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,”

And that’s it. They pick a way to go in the pitch black alley and decide to just hike until they find the way to a gas station.

It’s silent for hours as they walk, with Bellamy’s words circling her mind. How he looked her in the eye and told her that he didn’t think she could look after herself.

The first walker they encounter doesn’t come as a surprise.

Bellamy stills, a few paces ahead of her and turns around to tell her that she needs to be quiet.

She hasn’t said a word all night.

They are at a roundabout that heads out of the town; it’s full to the brim with cars and leads to a highway that is only more crowded.

The walker comes at them in full force, emerging from the shadows from a direction that Bellamy hasn’t looked to.

Clarke shoots it down before it has so much as seen him, stomps over to the carcass, and yanks the arrow from its throat without any of the elegance she’d normally have.

He keeps his gun to his face, in case the sounds that he’d heard were coming from any other direction, but the night returns to silence and she shoves past him as they cross through the roundabout.

“Who can’t take care of themselves now,” she mutters underneath her breath, hoping selfishly that he can hear her.

Clarke thinks he misses it because he doesn’t react until they reach an underpass that leads to the highway.

She jumps up to a car, instinctively, like they were only doing this yesterday.

It’s been weeks since they were last gliding across the roofs of abandoned vehicles.

He growls under his breath before he answers her.

“It’s not like that,”

His voice is guarded, armored. Like he’s preparing for a fight. If that’s what he wants, then she’ll give it to him.

“You know it’s no wonder you’re gonna be a writer someday, with words like yours. You sure know how to cut people, Bell,” she laughs humorlessly, sending a look his way that she hopes conveys how let down she really is.

He nods, accepting, then sighs heavily.

“It’s not like that,” he repeats simply as he jumps over to a minibus that lifts him higher than anything else for as far as they can see.

Which admittedly isn’t that far.

Clarke huffs a cloud of frozen air, noticing that she’d put on his fleece before they left.

It doesn’t smell so much like him anymore.

“I get that I am not your sister or Raven. I know that I think a little too much in comparison to them but-”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,”

His voice breaks like he’s trying way too hard to keep it under control, but it is still harsh.

“You’re right,” she says, ready to give up. “I don’t.”

When she falls off a three door car a while later, she doesn’t wait for him to take notice.

He stops a way ahead of her but doesn’t turn to help as Clarke brushes herself off, cracking the wrist that she fell on awkwardly.

There is a sign for a gas station a few miles north that pushes her forward. She can’t stand this. He’s acting like she is no one to him.

Bellamy shoots something in a car that is parked in the middle lane, something that is tucked into the backseat and really doesn’t have a way of getting out considering how tightly each door is pressed to the other.

He still shoots it and the sound of gunfire angers Clarke even more.

She won’t say anything to him; if he wants to take his anger out on walkers that don’t even pose a threat right now, he’ll just have to be prepared for the walkers that do.

When Clarke can catch sight of the gas station that they’ve been aiming for, she breathes a sigh of relief and jumps down to walk along the edge of the highway, tiptoeing across the barricade like a balance beam.

Bellamy catches her arm and pulls her down before she can get any closer to it.

“Why did you even come, Clarke?”

She bristles, ignores the sun as it starts to rise and lets the tiredness wash over her before she answers.

“Why did you, Bellamy?”

She looks at him and waits for a response with as much patience as she can muster. He watches his boots while he decides what to do.

When enough time has passed for Clarke to know he’s not going to answer, she barks a laugh cynically.

“You don’t get to have it both ways,”

She tuts her teeth together, like her mother used to when she was disappointed, and then instantly reprimands herself for doing it. Clarke always hated when she’d do that.

She shrugs off the grip that he has on her forearm and turns, only to hear the sounds that they’ve already heard twice tonight.

There is a turn-off just before the gas station that leads to another junction. Clarke can hear that there is more than one up that way.

Bellamy hears it too, because he pulls her down to the ground near the closest car and whispers in her ear.

“You want to fight?”

For a moment she considers him and wonders what on earth he’s talking about. Then she realizes that he’s gesturing his head towards the origin of the groans.

“Is there ever another option?” she asks resignedly.

Bellamy takes that as his invitation to shuffle forward, going far enough to turn his head down the small path, only wide enough to be one-way, and looks back.

Clarke joins him when he nods his head.

“There’s five of them. On my signal I want you to run and I’ll cover you,”

He sounds set, sounds like he’s thought this through a thousand times. She scoffs though, causing him to turn to her with an arched eyebrow. As if he thought she would just go along with this.

“Bellamy,” she says, voice stern. “We aren’t doing this.”

He rolls his eyes, but there’s no fondness there anymore.

“I’m not letting you get yourself killed,” she pushes.

“If we are just going to argue at every corner then we’re as good as dead anyway,”

“Then compromise,” Clarke answers, giving him no more room to counter her before she leaps to her feet and takes off.

She wouldn’t do it if she didn’t trust that he’s behind her, knowing that this isn’t a time to be reckless. But there is no way that she’s going to let him think that she needs protecting.

He takes the first three, and she takes the two at the back.

It’s over as quickly as it starts.

Clarke realizes that they’ve never had to do it like this before, never had to work like this. Like a team, just the two of them.

It comes naturally, she thinks. Both knowing what the other is going to aim for without so much as a word.

It only pisses her off more, because of course they fight perfectly together.

It’s when they reach the gas station that that seems to take a turn.

He asks her to take watch when they get there, and so she does, unwilling to argue if it’s just going to keep them there longer.

And it is completely uneventful, as she waits by the pump that he gets working with the empty can they’d stolen from another car.

Uneventful until she catches sight of a foot, just at the corner of the store connected to the station, peeking out.

“Bellamy,” she whispers when she sees it, heart stilling.

He doesn’t take notice of her, too busy trying to get the pump flowing after months of disuse.

“Bellamy,” she says again, kicking his foot roughly.

He looks at her, tired, and she nods in the direction of the shoe.

“Be quiet,”

He grimaces and then gestures for Clarke to go and take care of it. It doesn’t feel right. As long as the walker hasn’t seen them, they can just leave it alone, surely?

“Clarke,” he asks, not looking at her. “What are you waiting for?”

“If we just keep it down then it won’t come for us,”

“It’s not worth it,” he shrugs, and she knows he’s right.

That thing is dead after all. It’s not coming back to life. Just because it can still see, and hear, and breathe doesn’t mean there will be any consciousness.

Moment of weakness, she thinks. Won’t happen again.

Clarke tiptoes her way over to the wall, enough distance between her and it that she won’t get blindsided.

And when she sees the walker, it’s an older woman with frayed, raggedy hair like the doll they found at Nebraska.

She shoots, choking everything else down, and then something happens that hasn’t happened in years. Honestly, she can’t remember the last time she’d missed.

But she does now. She misses: her arrow sailing straight past the woman’s head and launching itself into the overgrown shrubs behind the station.

And there is no time to reload before she’s being thrown to the ground.

When she has time to think later, if she ever makes it to later, Clarke will wonder why it always seems to be the older women that she fucks up with.

Like the one in the fog, and the one at Nebraska, and the one currently with its fingers clawing at her stomach.

There is a gunshot somewhere in the distant; it feels way too far away. But the walker falls slack above her, teeth slumping closed as its face neutralizes.

Clarke doesn’t try to get out from underneath the body when it stills. It doesn’t matter that she can’t breathe.

She just missed. She missed. She had one job in the only life that she’ll ever get to have, and she completely shit the bed.

She closes her eyes, lets out a sob from the pit of her stomach and when she tries to breathe back in, she can’t because the weight on her stops her lungs and her ribs from moving. And she feels herself act like a fish out of water for time that stretches out into hours, losing strength every time she swallows a vacuum.

She smells gasoline all around her head, framing her as it soaks through to her hair.

And then there are Bellamy’s arms lifting the woman and launching it as far as he can before he’s back and crouched over her on his knees like he’s praying.

Clarke feels his hand in her hair, pulling her forward so she has to sit up out of the puddle of gasoline that he spilled in his rush to get to her.

When her face collides with his chest, it’s like a rush of air and she can finally breathe again. With his hand cradling the curve of her skull and the other clutching at her back, Clarke feels herself relax.

He holds her but she doesn’t let out another sob: she just grips at his t-shirt, fisting it so hard that when she takes her hands away, she’s sure there might be holes in the fabric.

If Bellamy says her name, she doesn’t hear it.

Eventually her pulse drifts back to normal, and his breathing starts to slow down, and sitting there holding each other turns into a moment that they can’t afford right now.

When he kisses the space underneath her eyebrow, without intention just absentmindedly, and pulls away, all of the coldness and malice has vanished. It seems to have evaporated away into thin air, having been replaced by the actuality of the risk of losing one another.

He’s just looking at her like Bellamy looks at Clarke. Like he’s been looking at her for the past couple of weeks.

“You’re okay, Princess,” he hums, lips pressing to a point just above her eye.

“I know,” she whispers back, voice perfectly steady now. “I don’t think I’ve ever smelled this bad.”

It’s a shitty attempt at a joke, but it is technically true. All Clarke can smell is the concentrated fumes of petrol fusing with her hair, and the scent of death in her clothes, strands of red hair intertwining with the material.

Bellamy snickers into her hair, nose brushing her hairline.

“All you smell like is you,” he promises, rocking her to the side.

“And you’re a shitty liar,”

He lifts her up, carrying Clarke to her feet until she shrugs him off.

Bellamy picks the emptying can up off of the floor and jogs it back over to the pump. He fills it up within minutes more, and screws the lid on to it roughly, shoving it into his bag like he wants nothing more than to leave this hellhole.

When they make their way back down the highway, the sun is starting to rise, and they have to speed up if they’re going to make it back before midday.

Clarke hadn’t really thought about how far out they’d have had to walk to get what they needed, and now she can feel the clock ticking down the time they have left to reach the truck.

Regardless, Bellamy picks a route of cars adjacent to hers.

She hasn’t forgiven him for what he said, and she’s sure that he hasn’t forgiven her for whatever it is that he’s pissed about.

It might have something to do with the other night, or it might be something else. Either way, there’s too much that has been left unsaid.

When they get about halfway back to the truck, Bellamy asks her how she’s feeling.

It’s shy, tentative, gentle in a way a boy might ask a girl to the prom.

“I missed,” is all she says. She doesn’t look at him, because even though he said all of that shit back there, she’s still scared to see the disappointment in his eyes. “I missed, Bellamy,”

They move through the underpass away from the highway, having dropped down from the cars and they are stumbling along next to each other, hands knocking between their bags.

“I haven’t done that since I was seventeen,” she laughs, not quite seeing how it’s funny.

He speeds up and Clarke takes the message instantly. Even she is disgusted with herself.

But he only steps forwards briefly before he turns around and grabs both of her shoulders, forcing Clarke to look him in the eye.

“Don’t touch me, Bell,” she whispers to her feet. Her words sound dead.

This is what he was afraid of all along. He knew that she would mess up. He knew.

“Clarke…” his voice breaks.

“You could have died,” she says as her hands grip to his forearms. “This could have killed you.”

“Princess-”

“Stop! Stop calling me that!” Clarke pushes, wrenching herself away from him because she can’t stand it anymore. “Stop saying that like…”

“Like what?” he prompts, and his voice becomes harsher again, pushing her.

“Like it means anything!” she cracks.

She starts walking forward again, done with not being able to read him anymore but he catches her hand faster than her skin can comprehend, and yanks her back into his space.

Bellamy holds both her cheeks in his hand, looking only a little unsteady.

“Clarke look at me,” he says quietly, and he waits until she relents and meets his eyes.

There they are again, warm honey as pure and as sweet and as smooth as silk.

“Okay, you missed today. We were both all over the place and you tried Clarke, but you missed. And look at us. We are still breathing, still safe.”

“But you almost weren’t. I almost…”

“Clarke,” he shakes her head a bit more, pulling her face just that bit closer. “I’ve lost count of the number of times that you’ve saved our lives. Okay? You Princess. You save us without hesitating, without considering anything else, you choose us.”

She rolls her eyes.

“I’m not suici-”

“I’m not saying you are,” Bellamy cuts her off, impatient.

She reads his nervousness in his eyes; reads the cautious way he’s approaching the line that she created.

“Jesus Clarke,” he groans and closes his eyes for a few moments too long. She wants to know what he sees with his eyes tightly shut.

“When we’re out there,” he nods over to the highway, to the hoods that they’ve left behind. “In the depths of everything and I can’t think about anything but the sound of my own pulse, I see you every time. So at peace, so… together.

I see you so secure in our survival and it helps me breathe Clarke. When you’re shooting that thing, it comes as natural as, as, I don’t know, falling asleep. And sometimes we can’t do that no matter how hard we try. That doesn’t make you any less of the fighter that we both know you are,”

His words break her even more and she closes her eyes at the power of him.

“You were right though Bell. You said I couldn’t look after myself,”

“And you told me I’m a shitty liar,”

“What are you talking about?”

He clamps his lips together, like he seems to have been doing a lot lately, like he doesn’t trust himself to speak.

He’s still got her face in his hands, fingertips dancing at the edge of her hairline, swamped in her falling curls.

“I was scared,” he answers. Nope, too vague.

“Of what?” she sighs back.

“I haven’t figured that out yet,”

“Then try,”

“I didn’t want to be alone with you. And I wanted you to be safe,”

“We aren’t safe anywhere,” she says, a little breathless and decidedly ignoring the first point.

“No, but you would have been safer at the truck. I already told you, I can’t lose you,”

“And I’ve told you,” Clarke breathes, her hand fisting at the edge of his t-shirt, down by his hip. “I can’t lose you either,”

He leans in, the tip of his nose brushing hers.

“Why- why didn’t you want… you said you don’t want to be alone with me. But then you made it clear that you’re coming, why didn’t you just stay behind?”

“I would have gone crazy not knowing if you were okay. I was already losing my mind and you weren’t even five feet away,”

She brushes her nose against his again, turning her head and letting herself smile faintly.

“Your overprotective brother vibes are showing,”

He scoffs and looks her in the eyes again. Yeah, maybe brother was the wrong word to use.

“Are you feeling better?” he mumbles as he watches her lips, finger twitching against her cheekbone.

“Yeah Bell. You make me feel better,” she admits, knowing that the game is up. Knowing that she needs to have a long and hard chat with herself about what all of this means. “You make me feel safer,”

He makes a sound, high-pitched at the back of his throat.

“You make me feel alive,” she repeats Raven’s words from last night. Now she sees clearly what they mean.

Clarke can feel the blood pumping all the way to her ears.

“You make me feel-”

“Clarke,” he stutters out.

And he’s about to say something but there’s a snap, there’s a twig or a branch but it’s underneath a boot that doesn’t belong to her.

She wrenches herself away from Bellamy and turns, keeps the emotion that she was ready to pour out at the forefront of her mind as she loads her bow.

There’s no doubt in her soul as she fires the arrow, piercing the neck of the grey-skinned teenage boy and reloading to wait for more.

The walker tumbles to its stomach flat on the ground, falling silent.

“See?” Bellamy smirks, brushing her shoulder with his. “Like falling asleep.”

Clarke knows that they have to go. They’ve spent too much time caught up in themselves and the sun is only rising higher in the sky.

But he stands and waits for her to take the first step, his hand waving forward.

On a whim, she takes it, linking her fingers with his and doesn’t look him in the eye when she pulls them forward.

They step over the body humbly, and Bellamy reaches for her arrow to place it back to where it belongs.

She squeezes his palm, ignoring the layers of clammy sweat between the two of them, and he squeezes back. Maybe a little too tight, but if that’s what he needs then she’ll take it.

 

…

 

He holds her hand the whole way home. Home being the shitty black truck that right now seems like an oasis.

He swings their palms clasped together when they cross roads, when they hover across the alleys. She holds his hand back, using it to earth her to the ground.

They were so close, so close to kissing back there. Even closer than their stupidly drunken night.

What she said a couple days ago still stands: they can’t act like children, and yet she didn’t lie to him once when she told him about how he makes her feel. And she wants to keep feeling like that, more than anything. She just can’t make the leap that she wants.

It’s a mutual, unspoken agreement that they are to break the link when they reach within earshot of the truck.

It feels like they are admitting to something when they stop holding hands. It feels like a secret now.

She’s about to thank him when they come back, for saving her life because she’d forgotten to say it before. But before she can so much as turn to him, Octavia runs into her at full sprint, arms thrown around her instantly.

Clarke takes her in her hands and holds her back for as long as O can go without squealing.

When they pull apart, Clarke shakes her head confused. Why was she the one that Octavia came to?

It doesn’t really matter because the brunette jumps on her brother next.

Clarke gives them some time, treading over to the front of the truck and practically bubbling over in anticipation of seeing Raven once more.

The two of them are sat in the front seat simply talking to each other like they’ve been friends for years.

Clarke taps at the window, shrugs, and then sends a smile Raven’s way while Murphy opens his own door and jumps out.

“Cutting it close, Griffin,” he smirks, walking around the bonnet of the truck to meet her.

“Don’t tell me you missed me,”

“Missed you? Hell no,”

Despite his tone, he takes Clarke’s shoulder into his hand and gives her a one-armed hug, probably the most awkward hug she’s ever had, but coming from Murphy, it’s a stretch in the right direction.

 

…

 

They have to drive back the way they came for a couple hours, knowing that there isn’t a road that they will be able to make it out of.

Bellamy sits up front with Clarke, mumbling something about wanting to see which way they are going.

It’s better than having to think on her own.

She teaches him how to drive stick, making him place his hand over hers for as long as it takes him to get the hang of it.

If it’s just an excuse to hold his hand for the rest of the day, Clarke doesn’t admit it to him.

She thinks he catches on to her intentions pretty soon in, despite how much she rants about the fact that they need to have someone when she inevitably falls asleep at the wheel.

It doesn’t take him long to learn, but he feigns ignorance and makes the truck stall half a dozen times throughout the day.

Clarke notices that it always seems to be pretty soon after she’s let go of him, but if he’ll let her get away with her schemes then she’ll let him get away with his.

“How do you even know how to do this?” Bellamy sulks when he stalls for the eighth time.

She grins, restarts the engine and turns to him.

“My dad had a truck a bit like this one. I learnt how to drive manually,”

“And he taught you to shoot?”

“He taught me everything,” she shrugs. “Whenever he was home I spent every minute I could with him,”

“Octavia told me you lost him a while back,” he says quietly, tentative.

“How did she know?”

“She was living with Raven when it happened. Raven was a bit of a mess,”

“We all were,” she looks at him and blinks the moisture away from her eyes to keep strong. “They found the cancer too late. He’d been out on deployment, so no one caught it. Turning into a walker might be one of the worst ways to die, but I’d take that any day if it meant I didn’t have to see him like he was in those last few months,”

“I’m sorry,” Bellamy whispers, hand tightening over hers.

“I wish I could say it’s okay, but it’s not,” Clarke tells him honestly. If he’s going to ask for her story, then she’s going to give it to him; brutal and unchained.

“That’s why you had to move back to Louisiana?”

“It wasn’t really a choice. I needed to be there for him,”

“I can’t imagine…”

“Don’t try,” she lets him know, hopefully.

Bellamy’s words seem to leave him, questions dying on his lips as Clarke feels his weighted gaze drift over her cautiously. It takes him a while to say anything else, and she tries not to feel too under pressure at having spoken about her dad’s death.

“What did he do?” he asks instead.

“In the military?”

Bellamy nods his head, eyes forward as he changes gear.

“He was a combat surgeon,” she says, unable to hide the pride in her voice. “Colonel,”

“That’s a pretty big deal,” he responds, and his recognition sounds sincere, unforced.

“Yeah it is,”

“So you really are a princess?”

Clarke gives him a side-eye, eyebrow raised as he smiles.

“You’ve never actually told me why you call me that,” she laughs instead, knowing that if she admits that figuratively speaking, he’s kind of right, she’ll lose all credibility.

“It just kind of stuck,” he shrugs.

“Yeah I know you think that’s an answer, but it’s really not,”

“It’s all I’ve got right now,”

Clarke purses her lips, waits until they’ve run over the speedbump and nods her head, accepting.

“When was the last time you got some sleep, Clarke?” Bellamy asks a while later when he catches her midway through her fifth yawn.

She’d try to convince him that she managed to catch at least an hour the other night, but he’d see right through her.

“Park up,” he tells her, nodding over to a field behind the lane she’s heading for.

“It’s okay, Bell, I’ve got a few more hours in me,”

“Park the damn car Clarke,”

She rolls her eyes and chooses not to argue back, turning her indicators on despite being the only one on all the roads in the city.

“That’s princess to you,” she mutters underneath her breath.

The next time he stalls the car is definitely not an accident.

 

…

 

She doesn’t park the truck on the stretch of land that Bellamy gestured for. She heads forward a bit more so that they are further downhill, knowing that there’s more chance of finding water here.

They do find water, but they have to kill a little boy for it. He’s wading through the river absentmindedly as Raven shoots it.

It hadn’t even seen them yet.

It feels wrong.

Clarke and Murphy offer to go further upstream, so that they don’t have to drink water that has already run past the twice dead child, but Bellamy has none of it, telling her that she’s been driving for three days straight without rest.

He snaps when she tries to find some wood for a fire but not in the way she expected him to.

Clarke had taken off his fleece earlier, shoving it into her bag when the truck was providing enough warmth. He holds her shoulders, sits her down by the unlit pile of sticks, and shrugs the waterproof jacket that he’s been wearing over her shoulders.

He doesn’t ask for his other fleece back. She’ll give it to him later. For now, Clarke wriggles further into the oversized coat and dips her nose beneath the material.

She tries to get comfortable about the oversized log he has perched her against, but every position feels unnatural and sleep runs from her as though it’s scared.

Instead Clarke chooses to watch him finish the fire.

Bellamy rushes his way through lighting it, and she thinks she gets away with spying because he doesn’t spare her so much as glance in his haste, blowing embers into flames before he comes over to Clarke and folds her up in his arms.

“What are you doing Bell?” she asks, face coming to rest in his chest awkwardly, cuddled up into him before she can even take in what’s happening.

He sighs heavily.

“In the house, when I was with you, you slept better than I’ve ever seen. And then on the truck…”

She feels her cheeks flush with warmth at the thought of the morning that she overheard his conversation with Raven. How she didn’t miss his promise.

“You’ve got things to do,” she mumbles, surrounded by his heat.

They are still sat upright, against the fallen tree that Octavia had found and decided to make camp against.

So he leans them against it and carries Clarke’s weight, making her feel so light that she doesn’t have to hold herself at all.

“We’ve got time. Stop worrying,”

When they are properly settled, almost lying with their heads against the log of the tree, Bellamy clasps his hands together at her waist, pulling her head on to his chest so that she can hear his heart.

She smiles into his shirt, nosing at it some more while she wriggles to get more comfortable in the damp grass.

“Will you quit fidgeting?” he snaps, chin coming to rest over her head.

“You don’t have to stay,” she quips back, smiling as she lets her eyes drift calmly shut.

His arms tighten just that tiniest bit around her.

 

…

 

When Clarke wakes up it’s the middle of the night. So used to only getting a few hours’ sleep at a time, she doesn’t really know how to sleep the night away.

She opens her eyes gradually, only to find herself in the exact same position that she’d fallen asleep in earlier. Only now, they both seem to have shrunk down from the log they were using as a pillow, drifting closer to the fire, and she’s got Bellamy’s fleece under her head, keeping her dry from the dew-soaked grass.

She’s on her side, he’s on his back. She has her fingers wrapped around his shoulder while her ear hovers over his heartbeat.

One of his hands has stayed where it is, clutching at her back to keep her close to him. The other has drifted to the back of her head, fingers carding clumsily through her hair in his sleep.

Bellamy is snoring softly, the sounds flowing gently through her.

She shuffles up his body, so that she can fit her head to the crook of his neck, making it easier for him to rest his head on something other than the flat, wet ground.

The fire is crackling at her feet, and there are words floating around her that she tries not to listen in to.

She knows she’s got to stop eavesdropping like this, but it’s just too hard.

“Do you think he realizes he’s playing with her hair?” Raven whispers somewhere off camp, low enough for Clarke to have to put some effort into hearing them.

Bellamy’s head shuffles down to rest some more on hers.

“Do you think she realizes she’s drooling all over him?” Clarke thinks that’s Murphy.

She wants to tell them to stop watching her and Bellamy like they are animals in a zoo, but that might have two fatal consequences: she might wake Bellamy up by snapping, and she won’t get to hear what they’re talking about if they know that she’s awake.

Clarke does make sure to close her mouth though, just in case Murphy isn’t only being dramatic.

Raven mumbles something that sounds dangerously close to ‘idiots’ before she’s moving around without another word.

It’s late, Clarke thinks. And they’re in no rush to move anywhere.

She moves further into Bellamy’s arms, seeing how close to him she can get, and before she starts to drift back to sleep, she drops the softest and quickest of pecks to his chest.

Just because she can.

 

…

 

“Clarke,”

Octavia’s hand is on her shoulder, jostling her gently to wake her up.

“Clarke, Raven told me that you’d want to take a watch shift,” she whispers down.

Clarke opens her eyes reluctantly, letting out a small grunt at having been disturbed.

When she looks up to O, she relaxes and tries to sit up, thankful that they’ve included her in the rotation even if it does mean that she has to let go of Bellamy.

Dawn is slowly inching forward, leaving the sky light enough to call blue, but not much lighter.

They’ll have a few hours before they have to leave; Clarke doesn’t mind being on watch while they have that.

She nods to tell Octavia to go and get some sleep while she can, then moves to sit up.

Her and Bellamy had shifted again in the night: now his head is buried into her neck and she has managed to intertwine her leg into his.

It’s a struggle getting out of the nest that they’ve made together, especially when he makes a whimper, clawing back at her in his sleep.

She’s tempted to stay where she is but knows herself too well.

If she stays then she’s just going to fall back to sleep again, and she can’t exactly take watch from the position she’s in.

When she reluctantly makes it out of his hold, Clarke picks up the fleece that had been taken out of her bag and tucks it under his head as a replacement for her shoulder.

Bellamy’s expression changes minutely. His brow furrows under the cover of sleep as he adjusts to the new position.

Clarke leans forward, knowing that no one will catch her now, and kisses the space between his eyebrows as gently as she can.

Using her lips to return his face to the tranquility he’d been wearing before, she shivers and has to take a moment more to compose herself.

She shuffles over to the fire and takes an arrow from the quiver that has been slouched against Raven’s stuff. It’s the best way to think, when her fingers are busy, so she starts to spin it around and around mindlessly.

She’s only ever told one other person about her dad (obviously not including Wells, who was there when he got sent to the hospital for the first time).

She doesn’t even know why she told him so much, the words just kind of came out. Not that she regrets telling him: she probably wouldn’t regret telling him anything if she’s being completely honest with herself.

It feels better, to share her father with Bellamy. It feels natural.

She knows she’s falling for him.

That’s inevitable now.

She hasn’t so much as kissed him, and she knows she’s in deep. Clarke just hopes that she can convince him for long enough that she doesn’t want this.

She thinks she’s figured out that there is at least some level of physical attraction between the two of them, even if she feels like a fucking ogre in comparison to him.

And there is trust between them. After they’ve saved each other’s lives countless times, that was bound to come eventually.

This feels deeper though, more instinctive than normal.

And they get each other, perfectly. He knows when she needs to laugh, or needs to be held, or needs space.

It just works.

And in another time, another life, maybe they could have something real, something lasting. But she can’t do that to him in this world. She knew that her emotions were her last resort, her last ditch effort if all else fails. And his heart is ten times bigger than hers will ever be, so he needs to save that as a final weapon.

She won’t use it up like that.

She didn’t let herself cry a couple nights ago. She does tonight. She counts down from thirty, puts her hands across her eyes and sobs as quietly as she can into them.

Ten seconds left and she’s a mess. Five seconds left and she can feel her strength coming back to her, rushing through her blood to save her from embarrassment.

Numbing her back from the edge.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Do your best, destroy me,'  
> \- Empty, Ray LaMontagne


	13. You know the skies are mean

“You don’t ever talk about Louisiana,” Bellamy says when they walk down to the stream a couple hours later.

They don’t really go with any intention. Clarke can’t bring herself to wade into that ice-cold water no matter how grimy she’s started to feel again.

She sits, takes off her boots and socks, and settles for swishing her feet into the stream, kicking through it as she thinks.

Bellamy drops down next to her, flat on his stomach into the ground that has more mud than grass.

“I do?”

“Not really,” he laughs, smirking as he starts to swirl his finger in small circles across the mud.

“I told you about my diner,” she remembers, matching his expression. “I told you about the auto shop. I told you about the people from my high school,”

“I guess,” he trails off.

“It’s just kind of sad,”

“That doesn’t mean you have to keep the memories all locked up,”

Clarke kicks her feet out, wading through it calmly.

“You lived in Boston your whole life?” she asks instead.

“Sure,”

“You miss it?”

“No, not really,” he answers, shrugging.

“Not any of it?”

Bellamy takes a minute to think, scratching at his head.

“There was this library in my neighborhood. I guess I kinda wish that was still around,”

Clarke wriggles a bit so that she is leaning on her elbows, down closer to him.

“We lived in a really disgusting part of town, so the library was pretty much a hideout for tramps, and it stunk of piss and weed which, yeah, made you want to throw up. But the old woman who ran the place noticed that I kept coming in no matter what, even after warning me that the needles I’d found in the kids’ section were fresh,”

Clarke hums, letting him know that she’s listening.

“She made a deal with me; told me that I had to stop coming in at sunrise every morning and in return she’d start making me these little packages of what she thought I’d like to read,”

“When did she start dropping the Shakespeare into the mix?”

“When I asked her what a sonnet was,” he grins, dropping his head again. “I was five,”

“No I think the word that you’re looking for is nerd,” Clarke snorts.

He’s doodling something into the mud, and Clarke cranes her neck to see what he’s drawing.

“So were you actually bad at anything as a kid?”

“I mean… I was never really good at anything, I just wasn’t bad,”

“Shut up, Bell,” she smiles as she adds a few more petals on to the sunflower that he’s been making.

“Weren’t you like valedictorian?” he counters, lifting himself up to stretch out.

When he’s fully extended his arms, he raises up like a seal.

Clarke can’t resist reaching out and poking him in the stomach.

“Salutatorian,” she corrects, as if that proves her point.

“Shit, you must have been the family disappointment. I’m surprised you didn’t get thrown out,”

“Cute,” she snarks, drawing a smile on to the face of his flower. “If it had been anyone else other than Wells then my mother would have stormed the place,”

“Oh so you really were in trouble?” he asks.

“I mean yes, but not really because of that,”

When she doesn’t carry on, he raises his eyebrows, still smiling.

“Don’t tell me you turned into a troublemaker,”

“A bit,” she leans, rubbing her head into her shoulder awkwardly.

“Oh come on,” Bellamy scoffs. “Now I have to hear this,”

“Me, Raven and a couple of my old friends tp’d the school on the night before graduation. It really wasn’t that big of a deal,”

He muses, clearly trying to form the picture of her running around darkened corridors in his head.

“I take it you didn’t do this sober?”

“I wasn’t flat out drunk…”

“Sure, Clarke,”

“I wasn’t! I just had a little… liquid courage. At least enough to sleep with the girl I’d been crushing on for months,”

If he reacts to her casually dropping the fact that she’s bi into their conversation, he doesn’t show it.

“Please tell me you did it in the school,” he says instead.

“A lady never tells,” she shrugs and then thinks better of it, coughing dramatically through the words ‘bio-chem-lab’.

He breathes heavily through his nose, a laugh to show he managed to hear her.

“Never pegged you for an exhibitionist,”

“And you’re a shitty liar,” she repeats, shoving at his shoulder.

He laughs again, ears turning pink at the shells.

Clarke purses her lips, too curious for her own good.

“So what have you been pegging me for?”

It comes out wrong, the hidden euphemism dancing at the tip of her tongue.

She doesn’t meet his eyes and takes instead to drawing some daises across the plane of the sunflower, making it not so lonely.

He makes a choked sound, his hand stilling in the mud.

Clarke doesn’t take whatever she may have said back as her finger accidentally bumps into his.

“I’ve been trying not to peg you…” he starts, clearing his throat. “for anything. Self preservation, you know?”

Yeah. She does.

“Probably smart,” Clarke hums, hoping he hears how pathetically hoarse her voice is becoming.

She bites her lip and selfishly wants him to put his fingers on her mouth again. Even if they are a bit muddy, she wouldn’t mind.

“Being smart is overrated,” Bellamy sighs, bringing one hand to hold his head up, his other still wandering across the mud aimlessly.

“True,”

“You’ve ruined my drawing,” he gruffs out.

“I fixed it,”

“You drowned the flower out,”

“I gave him some friends,” Clarke argues, wiping in the sun.

“He didn’t need any friends,”

Bellamy rolls over on to his back, giving up with the painting. Clarke can feel him watching her carry it on.

“You’ve got mud in your hair,” he smiles.

That boyish grin is going to be the absolute death of her.

“I’m probably going to have to shave it off if we ever make it somewhere,”

He scrunches his nose up.

“I’m kidding, Bell,” she laughs, rolling her eyes. “Sort of,”

“Do you need a hand with it?” he asks after considering for a moment. “Not shaving it, just brushing it out,”

Clarke feels a shiver run down her spine at the thought of his hands on her scalp again. She can’t count the number of times he’s played with her hair during their conversations. It’s probably become a habit by now.

This isn’t subconscious though; this is him flat out offering. She should say no.

“It won’t be tamed,” she shrugs.

He smirks a bit wider, nodding her over to him without another word.

Clarke doesn’t really know what he expects her to do because he’s laid flat on his back, head accumulating water and dirt from the muddy bank. He manages to make the look work, unsurprisingly.

Deciding to just wing it, Clarke turns to lay her head heavily against his stomach, smiling smug when he makes a bit of a grunt.

His hands land on her head immediately, like it’s a reflex, like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.

“How long do we want to stay here for?” he yawns lazily, content.

Well that’s a question she doesn’t really know how to answer. She’d stay here forever if she could, but that’s not what he’s asking, and it’s not what she’s going to say.

“We probably can’t stay long,”

He hums again, a little under his breath.

“That’s okay,” Bellamy resigns, leaving them in quiet until he speaks again. “You slept well last night,”

Not a question.

“I did,” she tells him, just because in a way, she’s proud. “So did you,”

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but you were drooling all over me so I’d have taken any escape,”

He says it teasing, which is good because Clarke is so ready to call bullshit.

“I don’t drool,”

“Tell that to my ruined t-shirt,”

His nails graze her skin, and Clarke has to turn her face away from the sky to hide the sound she makes into his shirt. She looks away from him, face nuzzling into his stomach, round to peek at the boots he’s moving like window wipers.

Bellamy does it again, a little harder this time.

So that’s just great, because that means he didn’t miss her whimper.

“You hear Raven and Murphy talking about us?” he asks, his grin audible even if she can’t see him.

“No,” she lies.

“I’m not wrong in thinking there’s definitely something going on between the two of them, right?”

“You’re not wrong,”

“At least someone’s getting some,”

He doesn’t say it with any meaning behind it.

“I don’t think it’s like that,” she giggles, poking him in the side so that he squirms beneath her.

Clarke raises her head to the darkened clouds again, deciding that the next time he scratches her head, she won’t bother to hide how she feels about it.

She closes her eyes, focusing on how he’s exploring her head. There is no attempt to detangle any of her curls- she knew there wouldn’t be when she agreed to it.

If anything, when they part, her hair is only going to look more wild.

“I like the sound of the river,” he whispers out eventually.

“Hmm,” she sighs, her head pushing a bit more into his nails when his hand softens, nuzzling like a cat. Probably purring like one too. “It’s nice.”

“I miss the beach,”

“I’ve never been,”

“You have never been!?”

“I burn,” she shrugs, laughing at his outrage. “Plus I basically lived in swampland. I’d never have been a beach babe.”

Clarke turns to wink at him.

“Too dirty,”

Bellamy rolls his eyes, snorting.

He seems to think about something, because he’s always thinking, always wondering.

“You need to see the beach,” he decides as though it’s just that simple.

“Yeah maybe one day,” she sighs back, eyes fluttering closed as he hits another unexplored part of her scalp.

“I won’t promise anything, I know you hate it when I try to, but I’m gonna get you there,”

“Vancouver has beaches,”

“I’m gonna get you there,” he says again. No emotion leaking out of his voice, nothing to really read into that much. It’s just a solid confirmation.

“I burn,” she says again, feeling the need to tell him that.

“Yeah,” he answers her, swallowing. “I know,”

 

…

 

Murphy and Raven take over driving the truck today, with Murphy awkwardly controlling the gearshift and not without making them stall a few times when he just stops caring enough.

Octavia tells Clarke that she’s going to spend a few hours braiding her hair into the fanciest way she can, while they make Bellamy take watch.

When he sees the finished product, he shrugs.

“Doesn’t she look just like a princess, Bell,” Octavia squeals, lifting the crown of blonde hair a bit higher on to Clarke’s hair.

He takes a couple more seconds to make his mind up, eyes squinting like he’s judging American Idol or something.

“It’s better down,” he decides, head nodding in confirmation, never one to lie in order to save someone else’s feelings.

Clarke doesn’t really know what to say, but she keeps the braid in because it keeps the hair out of her eyes for a few hours.

 

…

 

Raven tells everyone that she’s done driving for the day a while before the sun sets and Clarke knows that they’re going to cross the border into Canada pretty soon. She knows it.

So she doesn’t really want to drive tonight either.

They might be in Vancouver within days: this could just be the final stretch now. Adding one more day to that won’t matter too much to anyone but her.

While things would obviously be better in a safe base, Clarke knows that she’ll miss this. This freedom, if that’s the word.

It won’t ever feel exactly like this again. She doesn’t know what any of them might do if they get there, which sucks to be perfectly honest.

She wants to take the time to appreciate this.

She tries not to think about if the base isn’t even there anymore.

Having spent all day playing with the radio, Clarke doesn’t give up as they make camp, still fiddling with the dials after she’s shot down a rabbit that is safe to eat.

Octavia and Murphy cook it, Clarke and Raven go and get some water from a stream they’ve managed to find.

Bellamy has set out to make the camp a bit more homely, which feels silly really, and yet when Clarke comes back to her coat laid flat like a bedsheet, her/his fleece balled up like a pillow, and her bow strung against her bag like a nightstand, she feels her heart melt a bit.

He does it for everyone, of course. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

She doesn’t forget to note that he’s put their stuff the closest together. When they fall asleep, she’s pretty sure that his forehead will be pressed to hers.

She’d want nothing more.

Well… that’s not quite true. But it’s enough to know that his arm will probably swing over her hip in the middle of the night. And she will shrink into his body for the never-ending warmth he radiates.

He takes first watch, which Clarke is selfishly gutted about. She decides to stay up and wait for him to go to sleep, not that she’ll mention it to him as she feigns to amuse herself with the radio for a while longer.

It’s strange. Every time she changes the frequency it gives out a pause, like there should be some hope that they’ll find something. She will hold on to that.

Clarke knows that the stars are out: Bellamy always gets a bit quieter around everyone when they are. She lies on her stomach though, deciding to save them for when she can hang out with him.

He’s got his back to her at the campfire that is smaller than usual- there not really being a need for one as they inch closer into January. It’s still freezing, but a huge fire isn’t always worth it.

She’s glad that he’s not looking over; if he saw that she were awake, he’d tell Clarke to go to sleep and wouldn’t leave her any room to argue.

Hearing when his shift finishes by the way he stands up from the fire to walk over to Raven, each stride getting heavier like he’s trying to jog without making more sound than he needs to, Clarke hides the radio in her sleeve, ready to dismiss the comments he always has lined up on his tongue about not needing it.

“You’re still awake,” Bellamy whispers when he drops himself down. She can’t tell if he sounds disappointed or relieved.

Clarke shrugs, trying not to read too much into it.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she answers and hopes he doesn’t recognize the fact that she didn’t really try.

“Are you cold?” he asks.

She isn’t, not really.

“A bit,”

She’s already got his fleece under her folded arms, and one of his waterproofs over her shoulders despite how dry the night is.

Feeling only slightly guilty about taking another piece of his clothing, she accepts the overshirt that he’s wearing.

It’s green, like seaweed, and plaid. She shrugs off his waterproof, and the two fleeces she’s already got on to put his shirt on over her vest top.

His hands skirt the bare space beneath her throat when she takes the layers off, briefly, like he’s trying to stop goose bumps from rising.

Clarke hesitates to put her own clothes on over his, wanting much more to keep his hand exactly where it is.

“You know, I’m surprised you actually have any of your own clothes left,” she blushes, covering her face in the fabric of her top fleece.

“You’re freezing,” he answers, even though it’s not really an answer and he drifts his arm awkwardly over her shoulders.

They both lie on their stomachs, a bit winded, and Bellamy brings her into him like she weighs nothing.

His shoulder overlaps hers.

“That doesn’t mean you should have to live in a t-shirt,” she laughs nervously, top of her head rubbing slightly into his neck.

“You’d rather I didn’t live in a t-shirt?” he reiterates, jaw brushing her cheek.

“Oh yes, because that was _definitely_ what I was trying to say,”

“Princess, if you wanted to see me without a top on, all you had to do was ask,”

“I’ve seen you without a top on,” she smirks, turning into him some more. “Not much to write home about,”

They both know it’s a lie. She tries to pretend she hasn’t pictured licking every contour of every ab in a thousand different ways.

He’s smirking against her cheek.

When did it get like this between them? How had they fallen into this? It’s become so natural to just… touch. His skin against hers feels normal, anything else doesn’t.

She can’t imagine a time in which it’d be weird to take his hand in hers, or awkward for him to run his fingers through her hair. She wouldn’t want it even if she could.

Clarke turns around, falling on to her back now that he’s here, and waiting for him to follow her before she looks up at the sky.

His arm is still around her shoulders, somehow, so she’s cradled, forced to switch her gaze from him to the sky every few seconds. Forced as though she wouldn’t take every opportunity she can to study his face.

Bellamy has his eyes closed softly, his freckles shadows that absorb light from the fire.

“Constellations, constellations, constellations,” she hums and takes her time to do so, not really sure where she’s going with it.

He breathes that typical Bellamy chuckle, eyes flicking down to her.

“Didn’t take you for a cuddler, Blake,” Clarke whispers when he doesn’t do anything other than watch her.

He arches an eyebrow, because it _is_ a bit weird to say now. They’ve been doing this for weeks. Ever since that fucking nightmare.

“Tell me something special, Clarke,” he says instead, exhaling slowly like they have all the time in the world.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything,”

“My dad…” she says, trying to remember what he said to her as a kid. “He once told me that the stars are like…”

It’s on the tip of her tongue but it was so many years ago. It was a lifetime ago.

Bellamy gives her as long as she needs to remember.

“He said that they are like the forever streetlights, you know, the roadmap to eternity. Little stepping stones that mark each place. S’kinda beautiful.”

“Yeah,” he agrees almost instantly. “It is,”

“I’ve been thinking,” she says, not caring about filtering the words she gets off her chest. “Ever since I told you about him… I’m glad in a way, that he never had to see this. He never had to put himself through any of it. You know, the fight or die. He wouldn’t have wanted to live like it. He was in pain for so long, but this probably would have been worse. I know that sounds strange but I-”

“It doesn’t,”

“It doesn’t?”

“No.” A pause.  “He’d be proud of you Clarke. He’d be proud of how strong you are,”

“I’m not as strong as you think I am,” she smiles, kind of sadly into his shoulder.

“Well nothing I’ve ever said to you is bullshit, obviously apart from the whole liability thing,” he reaffirms sheepishly. Clarke wonders how this relates to anything until he finishes. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you that you are the strongest person I know,”

Not girl, not woman… person.

“You’re the same,”

It sounds pathetic in response to his admission, but she really does believe in him.

She feels his jaw lock into a smile against her forehead, and they lie there for a while, enough time to fall asleep if that’s what either of them wanted.

He’s clearly not asleep when he starts to mumble something softer than the non-existent clouds.

Despite every part of them being intertwined, Clarke still can’t hear his words, so she turns in his arm and looks down to read his lips.

His ribcage is acting as kind of a pillow for her stomach, but none of it is awkward.

Her face hovers over his, nose to nose yet his eyes are closed.

He lets her know that he can feel her there, by opening his mouth some more, like he’s inhaling her breath, tasting her as much as he can without actually tasting her.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire,”

She always knew his voice was delicate when he tells her things like this. She just never knew to what extent until now.

There is no doubt in her mind. She knows the ending to this like the back of her hand. It doesn’t matter where it is from, she’d never care enough about that now.

“Doubt that the sun doth move,” he whispers again, eyes blown shut and squeezed tight.

Clarke brushes her nose against his some more, loving how hers instantly warms.

She wants to let him know that she knows. This will make him proud, she thinks.

“Doubt truth be a liar,” she says, her voice breaking.

Bellamy opens his eyes like he’s been struck by something, meeting hers without hesitation because he knows where she is. He always knows.

Neither one of them finish, both challenging the other one to say it. Both letting the other one take it.

“But never doubt I love,” he whispers, eyes watching hers as the moment stretches into forever.

She has so many quips on her tongue, so many about how the ladies must have really dug the private poetry recitals, and yet none of them feel right.

Nothing but the truth feels right.

Maybe she won’t know for sure until she’s kissed him, but Clarke is pretty confident that she’s in love with him by now.

Well, that’s not quite right yet.

She knows that she’s not not in love with him- yeah that sounds less scary.

“Bellamy,” she mumbles, her forehead leaning against his as she wilts momentarily.

“Clarke,” he answers like a reflex.

Like she’s breathing in, and he’s just breathing back out for her.

“Can you do me a favor?”

He nods his head, barely trusting himself to speak.

It’s going to sound weak when she asks. It’s going to sound conceited and naïve and everything she doesn’t want Bellamy to think about her. But she has to have this from him.

“Don’t fall in love with me,” Clarke says it like it should be said with confidence, but there’s not an ounce of that in her question.

His poker face doesn’t shatter, not even for a moment.

She lifts her gaze from his mouth to his eyes, hoping he can’t see her lip start to quiver, or feel her fingers shake against his chest.

He’s watching her, giving absolutely nothing away, staring deep into her eyes and Clarke feels kind of… penetrated? Like he’s got access to something that maybe she doesn’t.

“You don’t like it when I make promises,” he says after his gaze switches between both her eyes for a while.

“I don’t like it when you make promises you can’t keep,”

His eyebrows are pulled tight together, mind travelling at a hundred miles an hour, pupils flickering around like he’s trying to calculate his way out.

“Then why are you asking me this?”

Her forehead slumps against his, falling as Clarke exasperates.

“Bellamy,” she pleads, tightening her hand into a fist against his shoulder. “Just, just give me this and I won’t ask you for anything ever again,”

“Ever ever ever?” he asks as though he’s talking to a child. He says it playfully, jokingly, like he’s humoring a kid who’s trying to get him to play with her.

“Ever ever ever,” she agrees, hiding the wry smile on her face into her shoulder, or his shoulder. They’re kind of the same things right now.

“Hey, forever is a pretty long time Clarke. How am I supposed to know you won’t break our deal?”

“You don’t,”

“Then I don’t really see the point,” he shrugs, his smirk masking whatever he’s actually thinking about.

He sounds like he’s kidding.

“Let’s just call the whole trade off and get some sleep,”

Bellamy turns on to his side, which makes Clarke turn on chain reaction. He wriggles his arm so it sits more comfortably around her and brings her into his chest so that she can’t see his face anymore.

“Bellamy,” she groans, pushing at him but not hard enough to pull herself away.

“Clarke,”

“This isn’t funny,”

He sighs, hand falling to stroke at her hair.

“Turn that big brain of yours off for a while,” he exasperates, fingers coming to rub at her scalp habitually. “You’re gonna explode if you don’t stop thinking,”

“Only after I’ve heard what I need to hear,”

Squirming into him some more, Clarke tucks her head under his chin, one hand ghosting his neck and the other gripped to his shoulder.

“You can’t have everything,”

“And you’re procrastinating,”

“And it’s late,” he squeezes her to him some more. “You need to sleep,”

“Bell,” she pleads and seconds later he decides he’s had enough.

“Fuck it,” Bellamy whispers, chomping down on his jaw so tight that she worries his teeth are going to snap.

He pulls away from her slightly, only so much that he can bring her body up a bit more: face to face as their heads lay flat against the fleece that she sniffs at like it’s a drug.

She wonders what he’s going to do; speechless and waiting.

Bellamy rests his spare hand at her chin, tilting Clarke’s face up to look at him while his other arm is extended beneath her shoulder, fingers dancing through the tips of her hair. Always, always dancing.

When he brings his own head towards hers, rushing towards her like they haven’t got enough time, Clarke freezes. Scared when he brings his clamped lips forward, she thinks that just for a second, he’s going to kiss her.

And he does, just not how she knows she wants him to.

But Clarke will take the way he presses his mouth to her forehead though, learns the way the skin of her face starts to tingle at his soft touch.

He pushes forward, so strong that Clarke’s head would be pushed back if he wasn’t holding her jaw so sweetly.

He doesn’t pull away as soon as his lips touch her head, just stays there for a while and lets himself kiss her between her eyebrows. That tiny space creased with all the thinking he’s trying to take away.

Bellamy tilts her chin up some more, before he takes his mouth from just above the bridge of her nose and brings it to her cheek.

This feels oddly sensual. It’s literally just a kind of extended peck, and yet it feels like it belongs behind closed doors, like she’d be forced to blush if anyone saw them

Like this is a moment that should exist only between them. If this is all it takes from him to turn her on, she can’t imagine how flustered she’d get if he were to move in any closer, kiss her any harder, put his lips to anywhere else, his hands…

With his lips still pressed, silky against her cheek, face tucked under hers, she mumbles out his name.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire,” she whispers again when he doesn’t move, both of them trusting that the other one’s eyes are closed. “Doubt that the sun doth move,”

“Doubt truth be a liar,” he answers, lips wet and soaking up her skin as he moves.

It’s hot, feeling him talk into her, feeling him speak to a place that is hers.

“But never doubt I love,” she finishes.

The second he stops whispering, his mouth drifts a little bit further down. It doesn’t quite reach the corner of her mouth, but it’s close enough.

All Clarke would have to do now is turn. No, she wouldn’t even have to do that, she’d just have to let out the breath she’s holding in.

But if she kisses him now, then she will never stop.

“Just tell me,” Clarke whispers, scared as she talks in case his lips touch hers.

“Okay,”

And that’s all it takes to let out the sigh. Because he’s made the deal now. Bellamy has told her that he won’t fall in love with her.

If she can’t save her own heart, she can at least save his.

“Okay,” she says back, because that’s all she really wants to say.

Maybe there is a tiny tiny part of her that is a bit gutted at hearing him agree to it, but that’s easily eclipsed by the knowledge that they will stay like this, just as they are.

“Okay,”

Clarke doesn’t even know what he’s agreeing to anymore. She hopes that he hears the relief in her voice, needs him to know that this is exactly what she needs.

“Okay,”

 

…

 

“If the two of you are going to _insist_ on cuddling when you sleep, the least you could do is take it somewhere where I won’t have to watch,”

Murphy, ever the most horrendous morning person, kicks at Clarke’s legs the next morning, making contact with her shins and he doesn’t hold back even on the fourth time he does it.

“Alright Murphy, I get it,” she groans, still half asleep as she snuggles back into the pillow behind her.

The pillow that has miraculously grown arms. The pillow that has molded to her frame, to her curled up fetal position like a puzzle piece. The pillow that is snoring lowly into her neck, lips pressed tightly to the tip of her back.

“Murphy,” Bellamy growls, voice hoarse from sleep. She opens her eyes to see the man rolling his eyes, and she flashes her eyebrows. A gleeful smug smirk taking over her face as she sends him a look that practically shouts _My Bellamy’s gonna kill you_.

“Don’t shoot the messenger, Raven just sent me to tell you that we’re leaving,”

“Tell Raven five more minutes isn’t going to hurt anyone,”

“Tell her yourself. That girl is terrifying when she wants something,”

Bellamy wriggles some more into Clarke, every inch of her body pressed flush to his. It’s his way of telling Murphy to get lost.

“So, did I dream that you spoke Shakespeare to me last night?” he asks, already smiling.

“Yeah Bell, you dreamt it,”

If she wasn’t trying not to laugh, he’d probably believe her.

“You slept well,” he says, just like he did yesterday morning.

“Even with all your snoring in my ear,” she laughs back, elbowing him in the stomach.

“I don’t snore,”

“Sure, Bellamy,”

He presses a quick kiss to her jaw, just at the corner of it, before he starts to move away. He rolls around to his bag, probably to collect his gear, but Clarke gets left frozen as she is.

The way he did it was so fluid, so natural. There is no way that he planned it. And it felt normal, like they were waking up lazily after a night of breath-taking sex. Like they were waking, wrapped up in sweaty bed sheets and each other.

Like he was saying _I’ll be back later. I’ll come home to you later. We’ll do this again later._

She doesn’t turn because he’ll see the flames in her cheeks. Clarke practically tears herself over to the truck, meeting Raven who is lounging with her feet hanging over the back of the truck.

“Murphy says you’re being difficult,” Clarke says as she swings herself over the side of the truck and lands next to her, hoping that, given some space from Bellamy, her cheeks might have cooled marginally.

Raven is looking upwards, eyes blank and face bored.

“I’ll kill him,” Raven shrugs.

“Okay he didn’t say you were being difficult… you feeling alright?”

“I just want to get there now,” she says turning to Clarke. “I just want to see Wells,”

“Hey, where’s this coming from?”

Raven doesn’t answer her so Clarke makes her sit up and look her in the eye.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just miss him Clarke. I want to know if he’s out there,”

“So do I, but that isn’t what’s going on,”

She considers for a moment, but Clarke gives her best glare and decides to wait it out.

“I guess I feel kinda guilty,” Raven sighs, her gaze flickering over to the campfire distantly.

Clarke follows where she’s looking to, tracking Murphy as he helps Octavia pack her bag up in the background.

“You don’t have anything to feel guilty about Rae,”

“Don’t I, Clarke?” she looks disgusted with herself. “I feel sick to my stomach,”

“Well, you shouldn’t,”

“You know he told me he loved me the night of my grandfather’s funeral,”

“He did?” Clarke asks, incredulous to the fact that Wells actually managed to strap on a pair.

“And I shut him down,” she laughs, scoffing humorlessly. “Told him I didn’t want him like that,”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because he was about to move to UBC. You know he couldn’t stick around in Louisiana. He needed to get out because he had a future. When all of _this_ happened, those first few weeks when I still had Isaac with me,”

Clarke tries not to think about that first month. She never wants to think about it again.

“All I could think was how pointless that had been. How he could be dead for all I know, and I gave him up for med school. For a future he won’t have anymore,”

Clarke understands why Raven told him she didn’t feel the same way. It was, to be perfectly honest, the worst timing. She’d just been given legal responsibility over her brother; Wells was just about to move to a whole other country. Clarke had always known that they’d fall back together though, in some way or another, eventually.

“And then I found you and I thought, yeah maybe I missed out on a few years I could have had with him, but you made me feel like I had a life worth fighting for. You and knowing Isaac gave himself up for me-”

“No, he didn’t give himself up for you,” Clarke has to interrupt because it’s just not true and if Raven goes on believing it then it will only tear her up more.

“They both kept me going. I know he’s been your driving force, but he hasn’t been mine, not really. I accepted that I wasted the time we may have had, and I’ve known all along that there was probably no chance that he’s alive,”

“And you met Murphy,”

“I met Murphy,” she nods, eyebrows scrunched like it hurts.

“If Wells is out there, the only thing that will really matter to him will be the fact that we are both alive and breathing, and _happy_ Raven,” it’s probably a lie. Wells might be hurt, but he’d keep that in.

And Clarke would be there for him.

“I’m scared,”

“Of?”

“That when… if I see him, all of those feelings will just come rushing back in,”

“You do realize Murphy’s not in love with you right?”

“Of course I know that,”

“We’re surrounded by zombies for fuck’s sake,”

“I know, I know we need to focus on surviving,” Raven nods, convincing herself as she takes her legs from off over the truck.

“No Rae,” Clarke shakes her head emphatically, placing both her hands on the girl’s shoulders so that she can get through. “I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying that life should be about more than just surviving. Do you want words of wisdom or do you want a shoulder to cry on?” she asks, weighing up the options in her hands because she can’t decide herself.

“I want whatever the doctor prescribes,” she decides, eyes rolling but grinning.

Technically, Clarke never finished medical school.

“I think you should do whatever the hell you want to do. As long as you’re honest with him completely, then everything will be cool,” then she has a thought. “Has he told you about…?”

“About what?”

“The girl from Nebraska,” she answers, not sure she should give his whole story away.

“No,” Raven wonders, “He hasn’t,”

“And you haven’t told him about Wells?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Take your time Rae. Let things take their course naturally. You’ll always have me in there,” Clarke points to both their hearts, needing to make the link visible. “Everything else is just a bonus.”

“Thanks Clarke,” her voice breaks as Clarke throws her arms around Raven’s shoulders, returning the hug that Raven was reaching for.

“You know you should really try following your own advice,” she mumbles, tucking her forehead under all of Clarke’s curls.

“Why’s that?”

That isn’t really the question that she meant to ask.

“Because everything you just said… you’re acting the complete opposite way with Bellamy,”

“That’s different,” Clarke shifts uncomfortably.

And it is. Her and Bellamy have along the way, become the leaders of their group. They all know that even if it has gone unsaid, she has a responsibility.

“Because you’re already there?”

“Because I asked him not to be,”

“You did what!?” Raven pushes her back, genuinely angry for a moment until she reads Clarke’s eyes and sees that small part of her that was crushed last night.

“We’re safer like that,”

Raven’s ponytail swings fervently, shaking her head like a disappointed mother. But she doesn’t say anything, probably happy with the resolution that they reached moments ago and swayed by the pleading look Clarke sends her way, begging her not to push.

 

…

 

“You are seriously trying to tell me that you’ve never seen the Goonies?” Clarke snorts a few hours later, bumbling along in the truck and shouting back to Bellamy who has thrown his head between her and his sister through the divide.

“You know that movie came out like a decade before you were born?”

“It’s a classic!”

“It’s a movie,” he rolls his eyes, looking to his sister for backup.

“Only like the greatest movie of all time!” Clarke slams her hand against the wheel, devastated. She turns to smirk at him. “You know that’s me and you through, right?”

Bellamy tilts his head.

“I can’t be friends with someone who hasn’t seen the _Goonies_ ,” she rolls her eyes, winking over to Octavia who looks like she’s about to burst out giggling.

“Wow, I didn’t realize you were _that_ superficial,” he laughs as he nudges her shoulder with his knuckles.

“Driving here Bell, in case you didn’t notice,”

“Wait that’s what you’re trying to do?”

He leans forward to fiddle with the indicator, switching it off as she rounds the corner. Clarke turns and shoots him a look that could freeze blood; a warning.

“You won’t be looking so smug, doing that when one of us dies thanks to all your meddling,”

She keeps her eyes on the road as she finishes turning the corner, but she jumps out of her skin when his lips touch the shell of her ear.

“Goonies never say die,” Bellamy whispers dramatically. Clarke can already picture him clutching at his chest, disgust all over his face.

The truck swerves, almost driving through a hedge when she crooks her neck to look at him, colliding her forehead into his when she doesn’t realize how close he actually is to her.

Bellamy breathes sharply through his teeth as he reaches up to coax his temple.

Clarke doesn’t even feel the need to apologize.

“You have seen it!” she all but yells. “You lied!”

“Please,” he snorts, hand still held to his head. “I’m not a heathen. Everyone has seen the Goonies,”

Her head may be absolutely throbbing right now, but Clarke doesn’t care.

“You suck,” she mutters low and ignores Octavia’s squealing.

“At least _I_ didn’t assault you,”

“No you just broke my heart,” she sulks, eyes narrowing childishly, “I can’t believe you let me think that I’ve associated myself with someone who hasn’t seen it,”

“For all of five seconds,”

“Next you’ll be telling me you haven’t seen the breakfast club,” Clarke says, wrenching the gearshift to try to keep the smile off her face. “And then start singing simple minds. Or, or you’ll tell me you’ve never seen Dirty Dancing and then you’ll turn into Patrick Swayze,”

“He wishes,” Octavia laughs.

“Told you long ago Princess, I don’t dance,”

“And here he goes trying to be all mysterious,” his sister rolls her eyes dramatically, making sure Bellamy definitely catches the gesture.

“Yeah the cover was blown the second he started spouting Shakespeare,”

“You heard that?”

Heard what? Clarke thinks for a moment. And then it sinks in that Octavia doesn’t know about last night. What she does know about, however, is the morning that Clarke fell asleep curled up against his leg, right next to the fire after the horrendous game of monopoly.

Clarke doesn’t dare take her eyes away from the road.

“Heard what?” she stutters, playing dumb and hoping Octavia guesses she doesn’t know.

They’re doing that sibling thing, she notices when no-one says anything, that secret, silent form of communication.

“N-nothing,” a pause. “Really though Bell, you sound like a douche when you say stuff like that,”

“Is there a reason you haven’t seen any movies from this century?” he asks instead.

Clarke shrugs.

“Tell me that Back to the Future isn’t better than any movie from this century and I’ll admit that I’m outdated,”

His breathy sigh says everything, flooded with exasperation.

“How old are you?” he begs.

“The same age as your little sister,” she laughs, trying to make herself sound like less of an old woman. “How old are you?”

When she asks, it’s a lot lighter than the rest of the conversation but Clarke realizes she genuinely doesn’t know his age.

“I’m twenty-six?” he thinks, clearly looking at her funny even though she can’t see him.

“You sure?” she giggles.

“Pretty sure,”

“Twenty-seven,” Octavia says quietly and raises her eyebrow when his head snaps to look at her. “You missed your birthday,”

“Oh,” he responds, lifting his hand to scratch his neck.

“When’s your birthday?”

“Halloween,”

“No shit,” Clarke laughs and holds her hand up. “Valentine’s,”

“It’s like your birthdays were made to be remembered,” O laughs back.

“When’s yours?”

“Ugh I got stuck with the shitty sixth of June,”

“I like the sixth of June,” Bellamy mumbles.

“You would,” his sister rolls her eyes again.

“At least it’s warm,” Clarke shrugs. “I just get to freeze on mine,”

“You freeze wherever you are,”

“And whenever I am… s’probably my cold heart,”

“Probably,” he nudges her again, but Clarke expects it so doesn’t swerve too much this time.

 

…

 

Bellamy spits a whole mouthful of water, not for the first time, all over Clarke’s face that night.

It starts when they settle down in the cargo bed, having to stop on the edge of a city line, and huddle up. There’s not a lot of space, so they’re practically all on top of each other.

And Octavia feels the need to announce tonight “I miss sex,”

If Clarke wasn’t cold before, she sure is now, blushing only a little as his drink lands all over her face.

She kept his shirt, and his fleece… and his waterproof. It’s becoming ridiculous now.

He doesn’t say anything. What would he say even if he could?

“Same,” Raven sighs, rolling her neck back, waiting for it to pop.

“All those apocalypse movies… no one ever spoke about how long you had to go without sex,”

Clarke hasn’t heard anyone say that word before. It’s more scarce than the z-word. But she guesses that that is what this is.

Murphy snorts. Him and Raven must be the best actors in the world, or they just haven’t gotten that far yet. Clarke hopes they haven’t; neither of them need to rush into this.

“I don’t think I have the energy for sex anymore,” he shrugs.

Clarke flicks her eyes over at Bellamy, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere other than here listening to his sister talk about sex.

Still, the darkness has given him this shadow tonight, one that darkens his eyes whenever she looks at them.

“I don’t think I’d ever not have the energy for sex,” Raven laughs, head in Octavia’s stomach and her boots pressed to Clarke’s.

“Say sex again,” Bellamy gruffs out, sighing as he drops his forehead to Clarke’s shoulder, almost in pain. “And I’m going to lose it,”

“Sorry big brother,” Octavia snickers as it starts to dawn on her.

Raven makes a sound, like a scoff while she turns to Bellamy.

“Oh come on we all know what you were like when we were in college. You certainly didn’t have a problem with sex back then,”

“And I don’t have a problem with sex now. I have a problem with my sister talking about sex in front of me,” he answers, muffled into the mountains covering Clarke’s skin.

“I miss bras,” Clarke says, taking a digression. “Like real ones you know?”

Octavia squeals: “Oh my God yes!”

“True,” Raven raises her water bottle as a toast. “We didn’t take advantage of feeling sexy when we could,”

Clarke wants to laugh, because even without any makeup, or hair product, and covered in dirt, Raven would never not be sexy.

But this feels genuine.

“Wanna take the girl chat somewhere else?” Murphy sighs, gesturing his head out the truck.

“Sorry Murph, you’re outnumbered,” Octavia answers.

He clicks his teeth, clearly uncomfortable.

“I’ve never had this,” she carries on after a few moments of just listening to the night.

Clarke lifts her head, confused.

“I never had, like, girlfriends,”

Her voice doesn’t sound sad at all, quite the opposite actually.

“It’s nice,” she decides.

“Yeah, O,” Raven says warmly. “It is,”

Bellamy still has his face on Clarke’s shoulder, but he’s turned to look at the rest of them, no longer cringing.

She thinks he’s looking at his sister, hopes he’s happy that at least she’s managed to have this, that she’s been able to confess that she hasn’t missed out on _something_.

“This is better than sex talk,” he hums, but quiet so Clarke knows it’s only for her.

“Now who’s bringing it up,” she laughs, head dropping on to his contentedly.

“Oh, I don’t mind talking about sex with you,” Bellamy says as though that was obvious.

“You just want to brag about your multitude of foursomes,”

She eyes him cautiously, smiling because she can’t help it.

“Obviously,”

His lips are practically bouncing, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous, Griffin,”

“Why would I be jealous?” she laughs, but she’s being serious now. “None of them got the Bellamy I know.”

Clarke thinks back to the way he holds her, the way he plays with her hair, the way he tells her stories about anything and everything. If she never gets to sleep with him, at least she’ll have that.

He wriggles his head further into the crook of her neck, making her lean her own on to his even more.

“I like being the Bellamy you know,” he whispers, barely making a sound so that he can be sure that no-one else hears him. This is for Clarke, and Clarke alone.

Her dreams don’t consist of nightmares tonight; all she remembers when she wakes up for her watch is the feel of being shoved up against the truck by a man with broad shoulders and a mop of inky hair. Her mouth being devoured by his, her lips being nibbled and licked and bruised with the force of it, his groans in her ear as she tugs at his curls.

The way she can’t stop the moan of his name when he presses himself even more flush against her, so that she can feel all of him.

The pain of having a wall of clothing between them, shrugging each item off like they weigh nothing.

Yeah, Clarke thinks as she scrubs at her eyes. I miss sex too.

 

…

 

The five of them reach the border between America and Canada the next day and it feels great, to know that they made it to literally the other side of the country all in one piece.

But it comes with a bit of a knock to the teeth: they pull up to a street that really has no significance, with Clarke hoping she can just pass through some woods and avoid getting blocked off.

And yet fate decides to work against her because the street carries on, and on, and on for half a day, and eventually pulls them into probably the thing that they’ve been dreading most.

A three-lane highway draws them in like a moth to a flame, wedging them between hastily abandoned cars and shards of broken windows.

There’s no doubt about it: they aren’t going to take the truck through this unless they’re willing to cut back a day’s work. And really, being this close now, the choice is pretty clear.

Clarke can feel the safe house between her fingers as real as the fabric of her fleece. She’s not driving all the way back behind them just because the only alternative would be to ditch the truck.

It’s quiet when they all carry themselves out of it, closing the doors as gently as possible, bags already packed because they could never afford to make themselves at home here.

She hears Octavia say goodbye to it as they set off, which yeah, that hurts. The odds of them actually making it were significantly lifted by this thing.

Raven says goodbye too, and it’s obvious that leaving it behind breaks her a little. She spent so long working on it, and now she has to let it go.

But that’s just the choice they have to make.

They aren’t useless on their feet. A bit more exposed, sure. There’s a need to be a bit more cautious, of course.

Bellamy takes Clarke’s hand when they take the first few steps away from it. She doesn’t realize she needs that until his fingers are laced with hers.

It’s an unspoken agreement not to tread along the hoods: even if Murphy could do it with a broken arm, they don’t know this area at all. They don’t know how many walkers could be around here, how many turned savage when they were desperately seeking salvation.

She’s on edge all day, every snap or crackle of glass beneath a boot makes her lurch. They all are. Once they make it back into the woods, they’ll all be able to relax once more but this has always been a risk.

The first walker they encounter is still in its car, groaning against the driver’s seat with its head slumped heavily, not even enough momentum to lift it.

Clarke can’t tell what it was before. It’s too unrecognizable, and she doesn’t care to try to assign any human features to it before she shoots it straight through the raised glass window.

Too far gone, just another one.

They find a dozen more like it and this is worse than a full-scale attack because they end existence after existence of half-dead beings that do nothing but sit there and wait for something.

It’s the right thing to do, though. The kinder thing to do than to let them rot.

She wouldn’t want to rot.

When north turns into a tree line, and leads them into the forest lining the highway, Clarke breathes a sigh of relief.

They aren’t out of the clear yet: there are probably hundreds of walkers ranging the borders of the mechanical graveyard, but the trees provide some coverage, even if that is just placebo.

She makes everyone sleep the second they make camp. No fire: too risky.

Choosing instead to take watch, Clarke takes the radio back out of her pocket, hoping maybe, just maybe they might be able to pick up some sort of signal.

She sits for hours on top of her bag, entranced in a way, by the steady turn of each dial, the way the connection to white noise seems to flicker each time her hand moves an inch.

Obviously not expecting anything to come from the endeavor, Clarke lets herself soak up the interference and sets about to put a tune to it, mixing and matching different pitches to the chords of any song she can remember.

This could be a walkie-talkie, it’s so small. Who would she talk to anymore though? The only people she knows for sure she could talk to are right by her side.

It’s a small source of enjoyment to pretend to be in control of something as she persists, refusing to accept defeat.

The moon unveils itself pretty soon into her watch and a few hours later, deep deep into the night, it starts to cast fractured beams in different directions. A little like a disco ball in the way the spotlights seem to spin on an axis.

They fall on to Bellamy’s face, all merging in one second like she’s using the moon for navigation, like he’s the light leading her home. There’s so much the sky will never know, she thinks, because he _is_ her home.

And she watches him, how the shadows dance intrinsically on his restless features.

It’s because she’s not with him. They have slept side by side enough times for Clarke to be able to see the pattern.

Their most peaceful nights are the ones that find them together somehow.

Something happens when the beams start to get bored of his face. As if anything celestial would ever get bored of Bellamy Blake.

As the camp is cast into darkness once more, the radio gives out a crack and cuts out altogether.

Clarke wants to throw it at something, smash her boot down on to it so that it knows what it feels like to be truly finished with, and she’s about to do just that when a sound is emitted.

 _Not_ interference. _Not_ white noise that has no meaning. Just music. Instrumental and irritating because it sounds like shitty royalty-free elevator music: the kind that goes on for twenty-four hours a day relentlessly.

And it is already one of Clarke’s favorite songs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'You know the skies are mean,'  
> \- How High, The Charlatans


	14. When we're dancing in our tears

This must be just a discontinued radio station or something, left on hold to wait for its owners.

It’s the first music she’s heard since the outbreak, not counting the Beatles song that Bellamy used against her. Clarke considers waking the others up to hear it, because she definitely wouldn’t want to miss out on this.

But this isn’t going to help them, not really, and they should get all the sleep that they can. She’ll take this moment for herself and tell them about it in a few hours.

Surely, she’s got the time for that.

Clarke listens intently, learning the tedious rhythm for a while as her legs begin to sway tentatively from side to side, only as far as she dares so as not to wake up Bellamy.

 _I’m dancing_ , she thinks. Well, not actually dancing, but close enough. There’s music, there’s movement, there’s rhythm. It’s all of the elements that make up a dance, and it’s enough.

Surprising herself with the laugh that escapes her throat, Clarke has to clap a hand over her mouth, waiting for someone to stir.

When no-one does, she breathes a sigh of relief, and takes the free pass to stand up.

Feeling like a kid tiptoeing on her father’s feet, Clarke starts to step around in a tight, enclosed circle, breathing heavily as she relishes in each step.

“You look like a four-year-old,” a low voice mutters from the ground and she looks down to see Bellamy’s weary gaze on her, a knowing smile across his face.

“I feel like a four-year-old,” she whispers back and looks into his eyes.

Something inside her caves and she stops giggling, the smile fades and, for some reason, things don’t feel so funny anymore. Bellamy doesn’t say anything, but he stands up and approaches Clarke carefully, wearing an unreadable expression.

“Make me feel like that?” He whispers lowly in her ear and Clarke shivers under her breath.

She leans down to turn the volume up, the change barely noticeable and when she stands back straight, his arms are reaching for hers.

She takes his hands, palm up and slowly but surely, she pulls one arm of his to her, extending the other so that her weight shifts and she leans back. Clarke then alters, so that the position is mirrored and eventually, Bellamy seems to get the rhythm. He swings her the same way, both passing and taking each other’s hands.

Their movements become more and more clumsy and eventually, Clarke starts to grin again, watching as Bellamy’s face lights up slowly. He laughs, a noise rumbling deep in his throat, and then surprises Clarke by bringing her in close.

One of his hands shifts to her upper waist, along the bottom of her ribs and she feels the tips of his fingers press lightly into the skin of her back. His left hand shifts so that it is cupped around hers, Clarke’s placed on top.

She follows, letting her palm fall onto the outside of his shoulder and Bellamy rocks them dramatically, beaming mischievously when she lets out a loud gasp at being thrown off center. The music is still light and easy when she rocks them back the other way, taking control of them both.

She lets out her own snicker at him being thrown off guard and they continue like that for a while, volleying for control awkwardly. They don’t mind the awkwardness, though, because they’re both laughing to themselves too much to care.

Clarke has to repeatedly tell Bellamy to be quiet when his laugh gets too loud at some points, but she finds that she doesn’t actually mind for now.

The walkers can have her while she’s in this state of mind. Dying when you’re completely free mustn’t really feel like dying.

Bellamy abruptly raises his arm and Clarke is sent spinning by the action, twirling under his guiding shield.

Her hair springs free of where it had been tucked into her coat collar and it whirls around her, yellow curls fanning out.

When he brings Clarke back into his hold, her residual momentum makes her collide into his chest and she braces herself on his right pec, his skin radiating warmth through the thin material of his shirt.

 _I’ll be wearing this tomorrow;_ she thinks as she tests the fabric out between her fingers.

Bellamy responds instantly, bringing his open palm up to the center of her back so that she stays pressed tight to his body.

Clarke can’t see his face because her head is slotted neatly under the crook of his neck, but his breathing quietens, or maybe hers just gets louder.

The music doesn’t sound happy anymore, not like it did. It’s still the same song but now Clarke can hear an intensity within it.

Bellamy moves his foot forward and because of their proximity, it pushes Clarke back just slightly. She clumsily shifts her weight and he takes that as an invitation to step forward again, his other foot moving this time.

This dance is different. This feels more intimate- which was, of course, inevitable because it always feels like this with Bellamy.

They start moving around in the same tight circle that Clarke had been in on her own and Bellamy takes his hand from hers so it can shift to join his other one resting on her back. She feels his fingers clasp against her skin and his touch changes, nails digging into her back as though he’s clinging on to her. As though he’s scared she’s going to be taken away.

“Wait!” Clarke startles, pushing herself off from his chest so that she can crane to look up at him.

His grip tightens and his face twists, shushing her hurriedly to stop her from waking the others up.

“What?” he asks after he has scolded her, amusement seeping back into his expression.

“You have got to be kidding me,”

“What?”

“You’re dancing, you asshole!”

Bellamy laughs again, pulling her back into him.

“Turns out I’m not the world’s shittiest liar after all,”

“You’ve got moves!” she says loudly again, verging on the line between being impressed and being outraged.

“I never said I didn’t. I just said I don’t dance,”

Clarke rolls her eyes when he spins her again, turning her around as steady as ever.

“You do realize that you’re dancing right now, don’t you?”

“No Clarke, I had no idea,”

When he pulls her back to twirl in their circle, hands returning to her waist, she doesn’t miss the way they drop just an inch or two lower, fingers splaying out.

“Ah I get it now. I’ve figured you out,” she hums, chin resting on the edge of his shoulder so she can still look at him. “You play up to that tall dark handsome look, and then you sweep the girls off their feet when they least expect it,”

“You think I’m handsome,”

“That isn’t the point,”

“ _You_ think I’m handsome,” he chides back.

She digs her hand some more into his shoulder.

“How’s it working?” he asks a few minutes later when Clarke doesn’t deny anything. His voice is a little choked, and a lot quieter.

“How’s what working?”

“The sweeping?”

“Is this not a tried and tested Bellamy Blake method?”

“Not quite,” he mumbles and lifts one of his flat palms to rise up her back. “My mom, she taught me to dance when I was panicking about my first prom. I was going with this girl… every single guy in my grade wanted to take her but she asked me, and I was so nervous. Mom made me spin her around the kitchen for hours until I stopped falling over my feet. It was fun,”

“Bet that girl was swooning all night,”

“Didn’t dance with her once,” he says simply, still taking the lead in rocking them together. “Didn’t want to dance with anyone else. Never did,”

Clarke loses whatever quip she had on her tongue.

She tucks her face a little further into his shoulder and tightens her hold on him, sliding her other hand down to rest above his heart, marveling at the power of it.

“Really, Clarke, you’re checking my pulse right now?”

She wasn’t, but now she can’t resist.

“Now that you mention it…” Clarke teases back and lets her finger rest over his heartbeat. He sucks in a breath audibly and there’s silence for an eternity as she counts the drumming. Too many, there’s too many for that to be his resting heart rate.

“You nervous, Blake?”

He doesn’t reply, just takes another deep breath and exhales it loudly to her ear.

“Am I making you nervous?” She’s smiling behind her words, uncontrollably.

“You always make me nervous, Princess,” He says as if it’s obvious.

His heartbeat is vibrating through her own and she can feel it in her eardrums, fusing through hers.

“In a good way?”

“Sometimes,”

She leans her head to the side curiously.

“What about the bad times?”

Bellamy takes some time to twirl her around again and she catches his expression in her periphery as she falls back to his body.

He’s biting back a smile, the rest of his face blank with concentration.

“You can be pretty scary when you want to be,” is all he offers.

She lets herself listen to the music for a moment. The cliché chiming feels like a warm blanket around her.

“I’m meant to be keeping watch,” she mutters, scolding herself upon the realization.

“It’s fine, I can see for the both of us,” he whispers back, spinning them around again. “Is this what it would have been like?” He asks after swallowing.

Clarke watches the lump in his throat bob up and down.

“What what would have been like?”

“To dance with you, in the other life?”

She recollects herself before she answers so that she doesn’t accidentally let slip something she can’t say.

“No,”

“No?” He sounds disappointed.

“If I were to dance in the other life, I’d be wearing some disgustingly ruffled pink dress, held at arms-length by a man I’d met barely once, who’s house was worth more money than either of us had ever seen. I’d be counting down the seconds until the song was over and my partner was swapped for another middle aged creep looking down my neckline,”

Bellamy snickers into her hair, quietly,

“Okay let me rephrase,” he begins, sighing as though he’s exasperated but there’s a smile behind his words. “Is this what it would have _felt_ like?”

His heartbeat is still thumping through her veins, but Clarke doesn’t want to answer, because then he’ll have to say how it does feel and she doesn’t want that. She can’t hear that.

“I was a different person back then,” she says into the darkness of his jacket.

“I don’t think you were,”

“You didn’t know me,”

“True, but I can take a guess,”

Clarke grins at the challenge.

“What was I like then?”

“I reckon you were feared by the people you met. You’ve got this vibe about you,”

He takes some time to adjust his voice, raising it to a pitch that makes him sound like a caricature of some teenage girl.

“Just you even try to get close to me and I’ll fuck you up,”

“I was definitely not that confident,”

“You probably don’t think you were… it’s a vibe though. And I think you were completely put together, everyone must have found that really intimidating,”

“Yeah?” Clarke asks, scrunching her nose up.

“Yeah, well,” a pause, “you had a good mask. We both know you were really a little monster, sneaking around that city of yours with your friends following obliviously behind your lead,”

My city, she thinks.

Clarke laughs into his chest again, brushing her forehead against the fabric just because she wants to be closer to him.

“You think you know me so well?”

She pulls herself back so that they can see each other’s eyes. His are pure liquid, dancing in the glow of the moonlight.

Clarke’s feet are lifted off the ground, sailing a foot or two through the air and Bellamy’s grip has shifted so he can hold her up higher.

The idiot must have decided to spin her around on his own.

“Well am I right?”

Bellamy asks before lifting her up again and spinning her like in the movies.

“Or am I right?”

“Okay then, smart guy, answer me this,”

He nods at her with that small smile on his face like he knows something Clarke doesn’t.

“You let everyone think you were a little ruffian, messing about on the wrong side of the tracks throwing pebbles at broken glass bottles and playing chicken on the highway? And then you’d sneak back home to your collection of books under the floor boards and you’d spend the night studying like the little bookworm that you really were. Am I right, or am I right?”

Clarke feels the size of the smirk on her face and knows she should probably stop it because it’s definitely not a good look, but their faces have drifted so close and he’s looking at her with that unyielding, unreadable expression.

Bellamy takes one of her hands again and spins her out, sending her flying once more and when she’s pulled back in, she rolls across his arm and lands with the back of her head pressed tightly to his jaw. He keeps rocking them, moving them from side to side and Clarke follows mindlessly.

She thinks she saw her parents dance like this once upon a time, late at night in the warmth of their living room, rocking around to a song older than the both of them.

She is pulled flush against him, every part of her touching every part of him that they can.

Clarke leans her head back so that it can rest on his shoulder and she looks up to the sky, watching as the clouds move eerily quickly, blocking out the stars.

“Is it weird that I miss the freedom?” She asks weakly and he responds by bringing his lips to her temple. He doesn’t kiss her, but his mouth is warm against her skin and she can feel the wetness of his breath flush against it. It’s an invitation to go on. “I had so much potential, so many opportunities,” Clarke says to nothing. “I was going to become a doctor so I could save lives, and now I’m trapped in this game, ending them every day. Is that selfish?”

“Please,” Bellamy laughs against her cheek but there’s no humor in his voice.

“What?”

“There is no way you could ever be selfish, Clarke. It’s not who you are,” his words are like silk.

Clarke has to suck in another breath through her teeth when the hand that was planted firmly around her waist begins to move up the outside of her body, ghosting the ridges of her ribs and he moves it over her shoulder, resting above the crevice where her neck meets her jaw.

His fingertips dance along the skin of her neck and Clarke doesn’t dare move. She doesn’t dare to breathe.

“It’s not in your blood,”

Clarke takes another deep breath before she answers, a pathetic attempt to normalize her pulse.

“I don’t even know who I am anymore,”

“You’re Clarke Griffin,” he whispers with a smile. “The person who has singlehandedly saved every single one of our lives without hesitation,”

He says it with so much conviction that it makes Clarke want to cry.

She pictures their parallel universe, the one that only exists in her head, the one in which they would get their happily ever after. She’d be swept of her feet by the man wrapped up in myths and constellations and she can see their love story like it’s written in his skin.

“I haven’t saved yours,” She adds because she can’t help herself.

“Yes, Clarke, you have,”

Clarke doesn’t want that other life. Not tonight.

 

…

 

“We should probably wake up Raven. She’ll be pissed if she misses her watch,” Bellamy says after minutes and minutes of the same taunting melody. He’s shifted her back, so they are chest to chest, and they continue to rock in small movements.

“I want to stay here,” Clarke says, and she hates how weak she sounds.

“We can’t Clarke, we’re too exposed,”

“Not like that, you moron. I mean like this,” she exasperates, squeezing the back of his neck where her hands are wrapped.  “I want to stay like this,”

He gets that look in his eyes again and swallows thickly before he says anything.

“I’m not going anywhere,”

He tightens his hold on her waist ever so slightly and Clarke uses the leverage she has to pull his head to hers, so they can rest their foreheads together. Her favorite place to be, connected all the way from head to toe.

Bellamy’s breath smells like fire fumes when he breathes heavily out of his mouth, the cloud reaching her lips instantly.

 _That’s what I’m afraid of,_ she thinks to herself.

“You can’t promise that,”

She feels angry but the words come out desperate.

“I know,”

“Then don’t,” Yeah, that’s more like it. That’s more her. She’s blunt and short and instantly feels more like herself.

“I know it’s selfish. But I want to,”

She wants him to stop talking like this, he needs to.

“You can’t,”

He nods against her head, but he hasn’t taken the hint. Clarke knows how stubborn he is and when he wants to say something, he’ll say it regardless of the consequences. Bellamy’s nothing if not reckless.

“What happens if we both get through this?” He asks and now his voice isn’t just thick, it’s raw.

“Don’t,”

Clarke hates how stern her tone is.

“Humor me,” he begs, pressing his head tighter to hers as though they might be able to communicate better through their telepathic link.

“I can’t,”

“Why not?”

The frustration becomes too much and Clarke shoves him back with all the force she can muster, wrenching herself away from his hold which makes him stumble back in shock, mostly.

He looks like she’d just burnt him.

“Because it hurts too much, Bellamy!” She says raising her voice and clawing helplessly at her hair in an attempt to restrain herself. “If I even dare to let myself hope about these kinds of things then I become weak. Because the dream of us all making it will cloud every decision I make and one day, that decision might become life or death. It will be head or heart and you know which one I have to choose,”

He looks pissed if anything, but he steps closer, back into her space and takes her hand from where it is fisting her hair.

“Hoping isn’t weakness, Clarke,” he sighs, with those liquid eyes again.

“No, caring is,”

“That’s fucked,” Bellamy whispers, stepping closer.

“It’s true,”

He rolls his eyes and then takes her back into his arms, wrapping himself around her waist once more.

“I can’t bring myself to argue with you Clarke. Not tonight,” Bellamy starts and leans in, so that his face rests into her hair, his jaw pressed to her ear. “Not when you smell so damn you,”

Clarke breathes against his shoulder, letting the tip of her nose ghost his neck and closes her eyes, squeezing them shut to make sure she isn’t dreaming his warmth.

“This is dangerous territory,”

He laughs, one of those few genuine barks that come out so rarely and Clarke panics straight away, slapping her hand to his mouth to stop him from making too much noise.

One of them needs to keep their heads.

His expression is solely apologetic when he realizes what he did but Clarke doesn’t take her hand away yet, just to be sure.

Bellamy’s lips move against the skin of her cupped palm and Clarke has to close her eyes to keep from shivering at how soft his mouth is.  

“We’re in zombie infested terrain trying to get through by the skin of our teeth. When are we not in dangerous territory?”

“That’s different,” Clarke shakes her head, still with her eyes closed to block out the tingles.

“Can we please just have tonight?” He’s pleading now, that vulnerable tone ripping through Clarke’s heartstrings.

“To be the ruffian and the monster?” She asks quietly, slowly taking her hand from his mouth and putting it back to where it should be; resting lightly on his shoulder.

Bellamy steps them both forward again and starts revolving in an over-simplified waltz step that isn’t without trips and stumbles.

The smile creeps back on to his face and he looks into Clarke’s eyes so intensely that she stammers over nothing but hot air.

“No, to be us. As we are now: scars and wounds and all. But me and you.”

“But me and you,” she hums back, letting the words come out in something like a lullaby. A melodic sanctity just for tonight.

“I really hope you and your Mom got to dance to something a little better than this,” she adds on as his hands drift to her hips, matching the way she swings.

“She used to like all that shitty, romantic, thirties music,”

“Ah, I was wondering how you got so good at this,” she says, thinking about how everything feels a little more romantic with Bellamy around.

“Some people have to work hard to become the Prince Charming, Clarke,” he argues but it’s without any venom. They both know he is nothing like Prince Charming.

He’s more than that.

“Give me a song?”

“I can’t remember now,”

Clarke knows he’s lying because he does that breathy pause before he answers and she sees the tips of his ears turn rosy.

“Sure you can,” She laughs.

Bellamy doesn’t say anything for some time more, probably contemplating whether humiliating himself is worth it, but eventually a rusted, off-pitch rumble sounds from his throat and Clarke realizes he’s humming gently.

The tune flows through her ears, gliding through every ounce of her senses and she lets her head fall to his chest, taking in every key of his song.

He keeps humming and the tips of his ears only turn more and more red but he doesn’t stop and soon enough, Clarke begins to recognize the song.

“I know this,” she says, incredulous.

“You do?” He sounds equally as surprised.

“It was in a movie I saw once,”

Without urgency, and before she gives him any warning, Clarke starts to sing the words carefully. She knows she’s a bad singer, but Bellamy grips her waist tighter and listens to her lyrics intently, like he doesn’t want her to stop.

“I sing better than you do,” He smirks to her hair after a while of her retracing the verses multiple times.

“No you don’t,”

“No, you’re right I don’t,”

Clarke feels the spread of his lips against her hair and smiles to herself, knowing she’s the one who’s making him beam like this.

She doesn’t remember much else. She wakes up the next morning encompassed in Bellamy’s arms with Murphy shooting her a knowing and all too smug smirk, but when she tries to move, Bellamy’s hold on her waist only tightens and causes her to fall back against his chest, helplessly.

Somehow, she doesn’t quite mind.

 

…

 

 

“The day I let pop culture die is the day the world really has ended,” Octavia informs the group after they come to the unanimous decision to plead with her to cut out the chirping.

There’s a chill in the air around them, cold enough that if it were to rain, the rivers falling from the sky would turn to hail.

“That doesn’t mean we have to listen to you rant about the masterpiece that is James McAvoy’s British accent for the better part of the morning,” Raven says, lifting down the layers of fleece from around her face.

Clarke has lost count of the number of mountains surrounding her, feeling like she looks more like a marshmallow than a person. Her teeth are quivering, rattling on and unrelenting, and her fingers have gone practically blue.

The only person who looks just as cold as she does is Murphy who’s lips are grossly purple. O has got just as many jumpers on as Clarke and a makeshift scarf made from a pair of leggings.

Bellamy and Raven on the other hand, already looking like Amazonian gods, seem to have no issues with the dropped temperatures, and are wearing no more clothes than they usually do.

“Well it _is_ pretty perfect. Even Bellamy thinks so,”

His head snaps around and Clarke rolls her eyes as she takes him in, only wearing a t-shirt, a shirt and a coat, like he’s just out for a bit of a hike.

“I have never said that,”

Octavia’s grin turns dangerous as she turns to Clarke and whispers conspiratorially.

“Atonement was the first movie he ever cried at,”

“Octavia!”

“There is no way that’s true,” Clarke beams, tucking her nose a bit further into his fleece.

“It wasn’t the first,” he sulks, kicking a twig a few yards in front of him.

“Sobbed like a baby,”

“What _was_ the first then?”

“I can’t remember,”

He reaches up to scratch at his head, turning on his toes to think.

Clarke looks over to Octavia in search of the real answer, but his sister just throws a wink her way and whispers something that sounds a lot like ‘I’ll tell you later.’

“What about you, Raven?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever cried at a movie?” she answers, shrugging.

“Bullshit,” Bellamy scoffs. “Everyone’s cried at a movie at least once before,”

“Not me,”

“Me neither,” Murphy offers, although no-one really needs to guess.

“I’m living with sociopaths,”

“Princess?”

“Um,” she thinks, trying to trace back all of the movies she’s watched over the years. “The first one? I think it was Ghost,”

“Of course it was,” he snorts.

“Hey! That movie is from the nineties. I’m not _that_ predictable,”

“I thought you told me it was Stand by Me?” Raven smirks, turning around to flash her eyebrows.

“Oh,” Clarke weakens as it dawns on her. “Yeah maybe it was,”

“What were you saying about being predictable?” Bellamy leers, hovering over her with a confident smirk.

“Okay, I cried the hardest at Ghost,”

“That’s only because Wells was blubbering right next to you,”

“Yeah Wells does have one of those faces… when he’s sad it kinda makes you want to cry too,”

Bellamy has a face like that, Clarke thinks. Or maybe that’s because she feels like her emotions have started to merge with his, symbiotic in a way.

“So have you even seen any movies not made in the eighties?” Bellamy asks her, handing her his water bottle so that she doesn’t have to stop to get her own out.

“Of course I have. Old horrors have nothing on newer ones,”

“Horror movies don’t count,”

“In what world?”

“In every world,”

“You can’t be serious,”

“Okay this argument is definitely not finished but we’re gonna need to do this when I can actually feel my lips,”

“It is pretty cold,” Octavia mutters, drifting into Raven’s arm for some shelter. “You never know, it might end up snowing,”

“Let’s hope not,” Clarke answers, knowing her toes are going to fall off if it gets any colder.

“It might help with all the walkers,”

“What do you mean?”

“Well we might not know how all of that… works, but they might just die, you know, if it gets cold enough?”

They’ve never discussed any of the actual biology behind zombies. It’s been pretty much the only out of bounds topic of conversation, probably because none of them have a clue about it.

Bellamy’s shoulder grazes Clarke’s as he lets out a shaky sigh.

“O if it gets cold enough to freeze those things then we’re all done for,”

“Then we get to Vancouver before it does. You know we’re probably only a couple days out now? Can you believe that we all actually made it?”

Clarke doesn’t want to cut her off, can’t remind her that they haven’t quite gotten there yet. It does hurt though, because the more naïve Octavia acts, the more skeptical she feels herself become.

Everyone else has the same idea, because they don’t say anything to answer her either.

“Like it’s been actual months. I can’t believe we even found you guys,”

“The odds are pretty crazy,” Clarke mumbles.

She looks over to Bellamy, who has his face set and blank, only looking forward so as not to give anything away. She wonders how likely it was that, after nearly twenty-four years of never being in love, she’s found something real, found someone who she’d cling to for the rest of her life if she could.

It’s tragic in a way. Part of her wishes she could go back to when she wanted nothing more than to see the back of him, knowing how much easier it would have been if she still hated him.

“And we’re actually going to find a safe place, all together,”

“Octavia,” Murphy says quietly, voice low in warning.

“What?” she brings her head up in question, eyes wide like she doesn’t know what she’s saying.

“Nothing,”

The air seems to get just a bit more cold, wind picking up as it carries with it a new kind of tension. It’s a good excuse to cut the conversation short and Clarke snuggles further into her fleeces, enough to make a blanket out of, trying desperately not to think about how they are at the edge now. Painfully close, but not quite close enough.

Close enough will never quite be close enough anymore though. The only close enough will be when they’re inside the gates of the safehouse.

 

…

 

They are walking through a national park; that becomes clear when they start to see little wooden signs that let them know how to get to the nearest parking lots, the closest cabins, and all of the different hiking trails.

It feels like a promise that they will be able to hide amongst the trees for a while, all feeing so much more comfortable in the woods than they ever will in cities.

Ice has started to form across the grass, crunching beneath their feet, and sliding them off the moss. Clarke wouldn’t be surprised to see glaciers drift across the next river they find.

She’s having to use a sweaty pair of socks as gloves now, hands shoved deep into the bottom of her pockets to stop her fingers from falling off.

The landscape is like something out of a movie, romantic and idyllic with the chill visibly drifting through the evergreen trees.

It’s different to the tragic beauty of the miles of cars stricken along the highway, and different to the tranquility of their farm, the cottage with honeysuckle climbing the walls.

This place feels like a fairy tale, one that you have to earn the opportunity to include yourself in. Streams always trickling around somewhere, pebbled walkways and inclines that actually manage to drag a sweat from her skin.

Here, they can walk and pretend that that is all it is: just a walk. Just out for a hike.

Raven asks her if she thinks the infection has even spread to where they are. Clarke isn’t optimistic enough to believe they’ve beat the spread, but this place is unlike anything they’ve seen before so who knows?

She’s still on hyperalert. That will probably never go away again, and yet there’s an easiness as they walk through the park, like the trees are telling them that they can relax even if it’s only for a moment.

And that all comes crashing down the second they reach a picnic table, just to the right of a wooden bridge overlining a small creek.

“Hey look!” Octavia calls, having run a little further ahead than she ever would have in the streets. “You think we’ll catch Yogi Bear somewhere round here?”

She kicks up, legs swinging to rest her feet on the seat of the table.

“I wouldn’t joke about that,”

“Please, it’s too cold for there to actually be bears out,”

“You don’t know that,” Bellamy smirks, dropping himself down below his sister.

Murphy and Raven approach them, fingertips brushing only a little as they take the other side of the bench, leaving no room for Clarke to sit down.

Bellamy doesn’t even look at her when she stumbles over to the table bringing up the rear; he just wraps one of his arms her waist, hooking her into him in one fluid motion and heaving her into his lap.

She lands clumsily, feet flying up and almost falling backwards as she tumbles into his shoulder, his arm coming to rest over her own lap like Jenga blocks.

It sure feels like they’ll be taking a break for a few minutes at least, so Clarke takes the ticket to let the fatigue hit her, head lolling forward to land on his shoulder like that’s all it’s been waiting to do.

His body is still radiating endless amounts of heat. It’s unfair really, unjust. He feels as cozy as one of those teddy bears; the kind you could put into the microwave so their stomachs would emit warmth all night long.

No one says anything at all as she settles into him, taking mere seconds to do so as it comes like second nature now, his fingers tapping and trailing doodles all over her back.

“I hadn’t even thought about bears,”

“Jesus, let’s hope they’re immune,”

“Zombie bears… you think you could take one of them, Princess?” Bellamy hums.

“I’d rather not,” she answers, scrunching her nose up and ignoring the shiver that works its way up her spine.

“I like this place,” Raven says, stretching her shoulders out across the table. “It feels… untouched,”

“It could be a bit warmer,”

“Sure, but it’s nice to feel like we’re in a bubble. We might not ever get this again,”

Clarke doesn’t quite know how to take that: on one hand, she might be referring to the ever-impending threat. On the other, she might be talking about the fact that if they get to Vancouver, it won’t ever feel like this again. The five of them against the world: too busy caught up in pop culture arguments and keeping each other safe to contemplate the true meaning of ‘the end of the world’.

Like O said, it’s going to be a couple days, surely that’s all it’ll take now.

Clarke doesn’t want to let go of this yet; she doesn’t know if she can. Being surrounded by the four of them has kept her going and as much as she’d die to see Wells right about now, she’s scared of how this dynamic is going to change.

She hasn’t got time to be selfish either. When Bellamy and Octavia find their mother, she’ll lose a part of them herself. And of course she is more than excited for them to reunite. That doesn’t mean it’s not a bit scary.

Murphy clears his throat.

Octavia chokes on something.

“We had a picnic table like this at home,” Clarke says quietly, lifting her head from Bellamy’s shoulder to peer at it some more. “Dad made it from scratch,”

“Is that the one I accidentally set fire to?”

She shoots Raven a look, trying to keep the grimace on her face when the other three startle to ask.

The brunette sighs, clearly regretting even having brought up the detail.

“It was when her mother found out she was bi… she didn’t react too well the first night and she threatened to kick Clarke out. Clarke wasn’t having any of it. She packed her bags and then we were both walking out of there with our heads held high.

Barely took us an hour before we realized we probably hadn’t thought ‘living off the land’ through. We snuck around to her garden, sat at the bench and tried to get as high as we could off the shitty weed we’d bought for fifty cents on the dollar.”

“Raven was trying to flick a match off the box to get it to light. For a scientist, I don’t think you quite remembered that wood is pretty flammable,”

“It’s not like you helped!”

“I reacted as best I could!”

“What did you do?” Octavia beams like she’s about to be given a new car.

“She was drinking vodka straight. Tipped her whole glass straight into the fire,”

“Lit up like a Christmas tree,” Clarke admits sheepishly.

“You didn’t?”

She squirms, wriggling her head back into Bellamy’s shoulder to hide her embarrassment.

“I was stoned!”

“And then we thought it’d be a good idea to carve our names into the charred bits of the table,”

“Let me guess,” Octavia laughs. “Raven and Clarke 4ever?”

“I think it was something like Griffin and Reyes?”

“That sounds like a band name,”

“We probably thought so at the time too,”

“Your dad didn’t even blink an eye,” Raven mumbles, not really going anywhere with it.

Clarke pulls out a knife from the side pocket of her bag, checking that it’s still sharp enough to cut clean into wood.

She hopes that she can do it subtly, while they’re all still talking, but this is something she wants to do.

Delicately and taking her hand from around Bellamy to brace herself on the table, Clarke starts to etch the first few letters of her name into the nearest corner of the table.

She feels Bellamy watching her but isn’t discouraged.

When she finishes carving in both hers and Raven’s surnames, she leans back into him, admiring her handiwork.

“Immortal,” she smirks, nodding her head down to the awkward star surrounding them.

“I sure like the sound of that,” Raven grins.

“And your death count of picnic tables keeps going up,”

“At least we didn’t set fire to this one,”

Clarke hums sweetly, dropping the knife on to the table and leaning back into her pillow, his arm coming up around her instinctively.

 

…

 

“What’s on the other side of that bridge?” she asks after a while of mindless conversation.

“We could go check it out. We should probably get moving anyway,”

“Back to reality,”

Octavia jumps down off the table, swinging her bag back over her shoulder from where she’d slumped it against the leg.

Not even giving her a chance to stand up herself, Bellamy wraps his arm under Clarke’s knees, the other diving under her shoulder as he lifts her and her giant bag up from the seat.

She tries to catch on as quickly as she can and briskly swerves her bow from getting caught between them and the table.

He’s still wearing his own bag and Clarke barely has time to marvel at his strength. He’s lifting probably twice his body weight and doing it as casually as if he were throwing a football around.

Bellamy drops her down to her feet as soon as he’s maneuvered them a few steps away from the bench, a dozen yards apart from the others.

Clarke’s legs buckle as she lands, both of them grinning at how unmistakably clumsy she is. She doesn’t even bother reaching around to load her bow, knowing that they’re safe for now.

He ducks his head at her, smiling adorably. Too adorably, Clarke thinks, as she leans over to kiss him briefly on the cheek. A thank you. Just a thank you.

“Come on lovebirds,” Raven calls from somewhere and Clarke has to break eye contact with him, hustling over to the rest of them as she shrugs her bag on some more comfortably.

The bridge isn’t in the direction they were planning to go, and yet it looks irresistible.

They crowd on to it, each picking a twig to drop down into the water, watching them patiently as they race to somewhere else.

Murphy’s wins which is quite a bitter pill to swallow; his smug smirk insufferable.

Then they cross over to the other side, expecting to just see another expanse of forest. It’s not.

There’s a parking lot, full to the brim, and on the far side of it, there is a log cabin.

Suddenly, the park doesn’t feel so safe. Clarke doesn’t feel so cut-off.

“Do you think they’re still…” Octavia goes to ask but she trails off.

So far there aren’t too many signs of there being walkers nearby. Sure, the car doors have been thrown open, but that could have just been in a rush to get away from other people.

Clarke of all people knows how brutal that first month had been. She wouldn’t blame those who wanted to escape for running.

The five of them seem to huddle up some more without a word, forming their outward formation like they’re protecting something at the center.

“You want to turn back?” Murphy asks quietly, nodding over to the bridge they crossed.

“No. We don’t run away,” Clarke answers him.

They sort of disperse when Bellamy gives the go ahead, and they start checking out each car.

There can’t be more than twenty around here, but they’ve been left bare, wide open and looking like violated skeletons.

“So we aren’t alone then,” Bellamy sighs as he approaches Clarke, having checked a few of the furthest cars along.

“I guess not,”

“I’m gonna go check out that cabin,”

“I’ll go with you,” she nods and doesn’t even bother to start an argument. He knows by now that there is no way she’d let him go alone. And she knows that there is no way he’d let anyone else go.

“Door’s open,”

The cabin is sort of the size of an extended shed, a green door swinging loosely on the hinges, the beams of wood outlining the walls making it look like a treehouse… without the tree.

When they walk in, Clarke sees it’s only one room, like a reception. A waiting room of sorts but she has no idea what someone would be waiting for out in the middle of nowhere.

“I don’t get it,” she says to him after they’ve looked around. “It’s like an office.”

There is a cash desk near the back wall, a telephone strung up at the wall with one of those old-fashioned spinning dials.

Clarke walks to it, turning it around to each number and listening to it tick its way back to the center. As she watches in awe, she feels Bellamy lean on to the wall next to her, head craning against it.

He reaches up a hand, shaped like a fist, and taps patiently at the wood, knocking once and then twice more.

She feels the corners of her lips turn up gently and carries on watching whatever he’s trying to do.

“Hollow,” he mumbles, eyes flicking over to hers.

She leaves the phone swinging from the receiver, bulky and black and cheap, and shuffles forward to lean her head on the door with him.

Keeping her focus on the sounds coming from the other side of the wall, Clarke reaches behind her to load her bow, going as far to stretch the bowstring back just a bit, preparing herself.

She tries not to let herself get distracted by being so close to Bellamy, gaze flickering down to his lips for only a couple of seconds before she nods for him to open it.

The only thing lying on the other side of the door is a tiny broom closet, cluttered and looking like it hasn’t been organized for years. The wall is just wide enough to fit a window on to it and Clarke feels herself become drawn to the deep scratch in the glass.

No, it’s not a scratch. It’s worse than that. More of a crack, narrowly eclipsed, as a thin shard is missing from the center of it.

She weaves through the mess, not too sure what is driving her forward and stands in front of the window, looking out through the narrow slit for any signs of foul play.

She feels Bellamy come up behind her, having to make a bit more of an effort to pick his way through the labyrinth, his boots being probably twice the size of hers.

Clarke lifts her hand up, finger tapping softly at the glass. He places his hand to hers, forcing her to turn her head around to face him.

He’s shut the door, enclosing them snug. The only light coming in through to the closet is from the window, shining on to Bellamy and Bellamy only.

“Careful,” he says quietly, both their hands still balanced on the glass.

The air in the wardrobe is buzzing, charged with something and now she can’t keep her eyes from flitting down to his mouth, taking in the way he is nibbling at the corner of his bottom lip.

She takes her hand back from under his reluctantly, looking back to the window to stop herself from doing something stupid.

Tracing down the thin line that melds into two, she feels the skin of her finger start to catch. It’s not sharp enough, not enough pressure for it to actually hurt, or to draw blood.

He shifts closer up behind her, chest grazing her shoulder and she closes her eyes to picture the depth of the black in his eyes. How if she looks into them, she can see practically ten of herself, reflections bouncing off each other like conkers.

His breath is heavy on her face, a warm smoky fan drifting through her everything, ragged.

She wonders how she can be this attracted to someone after having lived wild with them for months, having been around during the week where they didn’t get to wash for a solid eight days. And yet everything she’d usually get turned off by has been turned into another ounce of attraction.

She wonders how he can make her feel this hot and bothered, during the below freezing temperatures. How he can make her want to burn every single layer of clothing from her body just so she can feel him properly.

And the second everything inside her caves to the pure and raw desire, she flashes her eyes open, head still pointed towards the hand she has delicately balanced at the breaking window, and looks into the milky, pale blue irises of the creature separated from her only by an inch of glass.

“Clarke!” she hears, deafening in her ear as the walker throws its head, mouth unnaturally wide open with its jaw locked like something from _The Scream_ , forward as forcefully as it possibly can and the window shatters completely.

She’s read the words ‘shower of glass’ before, always wondering to what extent it had been exaggerated, but as the shards- as thin as grains of rice- hail down across her face, Clarke seems to get it now.

She barely has time to register the pain of a hundred scratches to the face, each dreg nicking at her skin like it’s made of porcelain, because the walker isn’t halted by the broken window.

It looks like it was physically fit in the time before: a guy maybe in his twenties and seeming like he’s spawned from an army catalogue.

It barrels its face towards her, mouth unmoving and hanging rigidly, and it hurls itself through the window.

Clarke feels hands at her chest, throwing her back like she’s paper thin and she tumbles back on to the crowded floor, landing awkwardly on a bucket with a mop hanging out of it.

She loses grip of the arrow in her fingers but doesn’t have time to think about it before she looks up, panicking, and sees Bellamy land a punch to the walker’s face. He hits it so hard that it draws back and lands into the grass a few feet away, giving him enough time to turn his back and run to Clarke.

She fumbles for her arrow, hooking it into place as quickly as she can as she tries to see through the blood dripping across her face.

Taking aim at the empty window, Clarke hauls herself to her feet, tripping only once over what feels like a plunger beneath her boot.

She drives forward, knocking Bellamy out the way, and doesn’t hesitate before she shoots the walker in the eye, still seizing around on the ground.

Unable to stop herself, Clarke loads her bow again and doesn’t wait to see if it has stopped squirming before she shoots it again, another arrow through its left eye so that there are two squeezed into one.

Now that it has definitely stilled, she feels herself slump against the wall on the side of the window, the only thing stopping her from passing out from the pain is the adrenaline pumping through her whole body.

She blinks and feels droplets in her eyelashes. It only takes another one to realize they aren’t tears, it’s definitely blood.

Reaching a shaking hand up to her face, just skirting the edge of it with a finger, she’s already met with a streaming and gloopy flow, trickling down her hand within seconds.

She’s glad she can’t see herself, terrified about what she must look like.

“Don’t touch me!” Clarke feels herself wince when a hand lands on to her forearm.

There is blood everywhere and all she can see is red. It’s terrifying and she feels like she’s been blinded.

“Clarke!” his voice is loud, probably louder than she’s ever heard him shout, but he’s panicking too.

“I can’t see,” she sobs, dry because she doesn’t feel like she’s even in her own body right now.

“Clarke, your hand,” Bellamy says instead, but Clarke can’t see it and she can’t even feel any part of her body below her neck.

When her bow slips from her fist though, she realizes just how bad it must be.

“I can’t see,” she says again, barely hearing the bow clatter to the ground.

Clarke reaches down, dropping to her knees, numb, and scrambles blindly for it.

She doesn’t find her bow; all she finds is a hand that links around hers calmly.

“Clarke,” he whispers, face inches from hers now as his other hands lands on to her neck. It climbs its way up to hold at her jaw until he stills and speaks again.

“Stay still,” his words gentle but she can’t even take that in right now.

His fingers touch gently to the area around her eye; it would meet her skin if it weren’t for the layer of blood between them. He is patient with his touch, swiping as soft as he can to get rid of the pools in the corners of her eyes. Each time he grazes a cut, she mewls, and he makes a sound in apology.

“Clarke,” he says again as quiet as he can speak, and it’s like he’s reminding her of her own name. “Open your eyes for me?”

She does as he asks because she’s not sure what else she can do. Her vision is patchy, the whole world tinted pink.

His face looks blurred, but the concern across it is crystal clear.

He’s got one hand on her arm, the other cupping her cheek and the second she meets his eyes, Clarke slumps against his hand.

“Bell,” she whimpers, her whole face throbbing.

As he holds her up, fingers rubbing into the back of her head, she slowly starts to regain feeling in the rest of her body.

And then there is a damp feeling on her leg, something soaking through her pants to drench the skin of her thigh.

And she tears her eyes from his to see what it is.

If Clarke thought her face was in shreds, those cuts are going to look like pinpricks in comparison to the slice across her hand, dense and jagged along her palm and blood pouring from it like acrylic.

“Oh my god,” she mumbles as she raises her arm to him.

He takes his hand from her other arm, and cradles it, holding it to his chest because he doesn’t know what to do.

She’s dripping blood all over him, droplets streaming from the tips of her fingers like water.

Bellamy hesitates for a moment before his lifts her arm to his face, twists her wrist between his fingers and brings the back of her palm up to his mouth.

His kiss does nothing to stop the bleeding, and Clarke doesn’t have the energy to tell him to stop, so she waits until he takes his mouth from her hand.

She has a feeling he needs this just as much as she does, but her face is still cascading and as much as his lips breathe assurances to her skin, they need to move. They need to make it to the others. They need to get to them before more walkers come.

Not able to find the words, Clarke hastens to her feet, clutching her bow in the wrong hand and shaking her head out to get rid of the blood.

She wrenches her hand from his face, a little rougher than she’d been meaning to.

“Clarke, where are you going?” he asks, incredulous and jumping to his feet to catch her.

“The others,” she answers because surely it’s obvious. Her eyes are still closed, and she falls back to her knees when she stumbles over a broomstick.

“Clarke,”

“They aren’t safe,”

She makes it to the opposite wall and fumbles along it for the door handle.

“Look at the state of you!” he demands, and she feels him push her away from the door, hands drifting back to her neck to hold her still.

“I can’t!”

“You aren’t going to help anyone looking like this,”

The panic of not being able to see clearly enough becomes too much and Clarke, not thinking, heaves her bow over her shoulder and reaches to scrub at her eyes. It’s a mistake. The blood gushing from her palm sinks deep into the corners of her eyes.

“Then you go!” she cries, pushing him away and hoping she hasn’t left a bloody handprint across his light grey t-shirt. “Help them,”

“As if I’m leaving you like this,” he scoffs and shakes at her head, losing it a little.

She tries to push at him again, even going so far as to punch at his chest, knocking both her clenched fists harshly to get him away. Maybe if he lets her go, he’ll realize what he needs to do.

Bellamy remains silent and waits it out, grunting on the twelfth hit. She’s too weak to do any actual damage and loses all the energy that she’s managed to scavenge pretty quickly, collapsing her face into his chest moments later.

His top is going to be completely ruined, she thinks, as she breathes wet into it.

When Clarke lets up, his fingers drift back to her eyes and he tries to wipe at them again, attempting to help her see again. There are too many cuts along her eyelids though, and she lets out a sob when even his most delicate touch becomes too painful.

“Okay,” he says with a rough voice. “Okay.”

He chooses instead to hold her into his chest, his fingers quivering at the back of her head and the other hand shaking at her back.

He doesn’t know how to help, she notes, and she wants to help him help her, but she can’t. Because the pain is only getting worse and worse.

He coos in her ear, and Clarke thinks back to the songs he’s sung to her. All the two of them. She wants to go back to that, desperately.

“Okay,” Bellamy whispers again, bending his face into her ear and clutching sharply at her back. “You’re okay.”

“I can’t see,” she mumbles because Clarke needs him to know that.

“Okay,” he croons again.

“I can’t see,”

She feels his lips grace the top of her head, pulling her to him like it hurts not to be connected.

Time ticks on. Each thud of her heartbeat comes a little slower and each time she breathes, Clarke manages to take in a bit more air, his mouth against her hair grounding her, anchoring her to the feeling of anything other than pain.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'When we're dancing in our tears,'  
> \- Lost Stars, Adam Levine


	15. I don't want to run from a bullet

Once her breathing has returned to normal, Clarke takes her hand away from where she’s gripping his shirt, knowing that this cut is too deep to be left alone.

Her eyes are still sticky when she opens them, but the blood from the cuts on her face seems to be starting to clot.

With crimson running down her arm, never ending like a waterfall, Clarke holds it in her other hand and places her fingers either side of the gash to add some pressure.

“Let me,” Bellamy whispers to her and takes her hand in his. When she cries out at the pressure he puts on to her skin, he winces but doesn’t stop, knowing he needs to stop the blood flow more than anything else.

She hisses through her teeth, wondering how her blood could possibly be this bright.

“Why aren’t you cut up?” Clarke asks him, curious as to how he managed to dodge the raining shards.

“I was stood behind you,”

She nods.

“I don’t want to pretend that I know what I’m doing,” Bellamy mutters, lifting her arm a little above her shoulder.

“It’s okay,”

“It’s not,”

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” she promises. “I can’t really feel it,”

“That’s not a good thing, Clarke,”

In an ideal world, she’d need stitches. At least four, because this cut stretches from her thumb to the other side of her hand, shredding her palm into two gaping sheets of skin. She needs to figure out how to clean it. The creek could work.

“I need to clean my face,” Clarke tells him but doesn’t take her hand away from him. “My eyes are stinging.”

“Do you need…” Bellamy trails off, gesturing awkwardly to her feet as though they aren’t going to work.

“I can walk on my own,” she says.

In any other situation, Clarke would smile at his offer to carry her, but her face hurts so bad, too bad; she wouldn’t be surprised if she loses a clean layer of skin.

He nods, and gives Clarke her arm back, hand coming to rest on her waist in case she needs steering.

She accepts the help, and grounds herself to his fingers clutching at her ribcage. He slides his hand further between her and the bag on her back, fingers spreading out some more so that she can lean into him.

When they make it out of the broom cupboard, the light in the log cabin becomes an overload, blinding her still raw eyes.

She whimpers, turns to Bellamy and the closet and she must make a face because he reads it instantly.

“I’ve got you,” he reassures, stilling patiently and making sure Clarke knows that she has all the time that she’s going to need. “You’re going to be fine. It’s just a shock that’s all,”

Clarke nods her head.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,”

“We need to make sure they’re okay,”

“And we will. Keep pushing on your hand, that seems to be working,”

Clarke doesn’t know what he’s seeing because the blood doesn’t seem to be relenting no matter how high she’s holding her arm up.

They make it out to the parking lot again, and Bellamy pushes forward to make sure they aren’t going to be jumped on from any angle, still wrapped up around her, just shielding her a little more now.

When Clarke catches sight of Octavia, she slumps into him some more, shaking her head to try and get rid of the unfaded pink tinge.

“Clarke!” someone calls from far away.

Her eyes flash open at the fear in their voice, panic making her face contort, painfully reopening all of the cuts that might have started to dry.

The word of warning doesn’t make it from her lips because she cries out, clawing at her cheeks, her nose, her forehead, to stunt the flow of blood, scared to lose her sight again even for a couple of seconds.

With her eyes squeezed tightly shut, Clarke doesn’t see Bellamy shift to come up standing in front of her.

He repeats the movements that he has already tried to make twice, swiping his way across any of the cuts that are beginning to run out of control again.

“Oh my god,” she hears from her left.

“Shut it!” he snaps at them, the focus and the panic distinct in his voice.

His fingers have become even more delicate, and Clarke wants to see who has come up beside her but the only thing keeping her from sobbing is the grip that he has on her jaw.

She feels her mouth open silently, her face emulating the sting of each gash.

“You’re okay,” he whispers, soft as though he’d never turned aggressive. His mantra like a lullaby. “Clarke,”

“What happened?”

Clarke thinks that’s Raven, breathless. She must have jogged over.

“Walker smashed a window,” Bellamy mutters impatiently, thumb brushing the space below her eyelid.

Only just remembering to keep her fingers tight around her palm, Clarke raises her hand again.

“She was standing right in front of it,”

“I need,” she whispers, voice cracking from the pain. “I need to clean my hand,”

There is a gasp, from Octavia, Clarke thinks, as she only now takes in the state of her palm.

“I can take you to the creek?” Raven asks tentatively as her hand lands on to Clarke’s shoulder.

“No!” The shout stains the air all around them; gives it a chill so cold that it makes the frozen breeze before feel like fire.

Bellamy’s voice is dangerously low, menacing and protective and his hand clamps around her face harder than he realizes. The pads of his fingers, once gently giving feeling back to the agonizing scrapes, are squeezing themselves into the cracks in Clarke’s face. She gets that he’s worried, that he doesn’t want to let her out of his sight, so she tries as hard as she can not to cry out.

“Bellamy you’re hurting her!” Octavia warns when Clarke can’t hold back the moan that threatens to spill from her lips.

His hands fall from her face like she’s given him an electric shock and Clarke feels the cold dig into each groove on her skin. She misses his fingers cradling her, needs his hands back because even though the pain is bad with him clamping himself to her face, it’s excruciating without him there.

“Bell,” she feels herself whisper, pitch raised unnaturally high.

Her eyes open slowly, needing to see where he is, needing to make sure he’s still with her.

There is blood trickling down from her eyebrows, the cuts on her actual eyelids having dried out again.

“Come back,”

Bellamy has dropped his face to his boots, having pushed himself away a few feet too many and he’s holding his breath, angry and completely undecided.

She feels Raven and Octavia on either side of her, knows Murphy is around here somewhere because he must have been who Bellamy snapped at, but she needs to have Bellamy back.

To say she throws herself forward would be an understatement, but if he’s going to be too stubborn to so much as look at her then she’s going to make him.

His arms come up to wrap around her shoulders, before he even takes in what she’s doing but Clarke doesn’t hesitate to bury her nose into his neck, needing the warmth back.

“Come back,” she says again, pleading.

One of the girls clears her throat behind them and tells them that they’ll be back with some clean water from the creek.

Clarke barely takes them in, choosing instead to focus on the way his face is resting lightly on her shoulder. He’s scared to hurt her, she thinks, but he doesn’t understand how much he’s keeping her steady by just the feel of him.

“I need you,” Clarke thinks she says. It might be too quiet for either of them to actually hear it.

“You should go with Raven to the water,” he mumbles, fisting her back just a bit more.

“I need _you_ ,”

Bellamy makes a sound, desperate. His arms meet each other behind her back and he succumbs to the pain of not being connected. She lifts her hand to his neck and worries about the mess she’s going to leave him in with blood trickling all the way down his body.

Bellamy doesn’t seem to mind as he claws at her, like he’s trying to touch her in every way he can, like he might be able to suck out the pain from her body and claim it as his own.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he admits, nosing into her neck, burying himself as deep as possible.

There’s still a gaping hole in her hand, skin flapping off grossly.

“I’m already hurt,” she tells him.

“I’m sorry,”

“Why?”

“I should have seen it sooner,”

Clarke knows why he didn’t. She knows why she didn’t either. They were both too caught up. Both too distracted by the heavy breathing of the other, both becoming absorbed in the air so brittle it could have snapped.

“Your hand hasn’t stopped,” he sighs briskly but he can’t pull away.

“I’ll fix it,”

“You shouldn’t have to,”

“But I will,” she assures and mewls when the roughly cut hair at the skin of his jaw scrapes across her cheek.

“Do I look like the joker?” Clarke asks when he makes another shamed sigh.

She thinks he might laugh; it’s choked whatever it is. It’s enough though as he rocks her between his arms.

Octavia clears her throat, and Bellamy pulls away from Clarke because she’s too caught up in her own frozen inertia to move.

“I’ve got clean hands,” she says, holding them out to Clarke gingerly. “Do you want me to clean your face?”

Clarke shoots Bellamy a look and he nods; of course he’ll come wherever she needs him to.

“Murphy and Raven are going to make sure we’re safe here for a while,”

“I can keep moving,”

“Clarke. This isn’t up for discussion,”

Bellamy reaches to Clarke’s shoulder, offering to take her bow for her and she only hesitates for a couple of seconds before she gives it to him.

It looks strange in his hands, but the weight off does help.

“Okay,”

They walk across the bridge, brushing past the barren cars without so much as a glance. As they each the edge of the creek, Clarke sits down and swings her legs over the river bank.

Octavia sets to work, a balled up t-shirt that she must have only just cleaned pouring water all across Clarke’s chest as she starts to dab at her face.

Bellamy stands at Clarke’s shoulder, holding her injured palm above her head and pressing into the skin to stop the bleeding.

O takes her time to clean her off, waiting until the white vest has turned a patchy baby pink.

“The cuts aren’t deep,” she says when she deems Clarke’s face as clean as it’ll get. “There was just a lot of blood.”

“Thank you,” Clarke mumbles, barely meeting O’s eyes.

“There were quite a few bits of glass still in…” Octavia waves her hand around in the general area of Clarke’s face. “I think that’s why it kept bleeding.”

Before Clarke knows it, the brunette is leaning in swiftly, wrapping her arms under her shoulders hesitantly.

“I’m glad you’re safe now, Clarke,” she says, kind of awkwardly.

Clarke takes her hand back from Bellamy, cupping it so that she won’t press the gash flush to Octavia’s clothes, and hugs her back tightly.

“Thank you for taking care of me,”

“You looked after me,” O whispers, emotion leaking into her voice. “It’s what we do.”

Clarke hums, the iciness of the water numbing the scratches on her face enough to bring her attention back to her hand.

“I don’t know what to do about that,”

“That’s okay, O, I’ll figure something out,”

Octavia gets up to stand, ducking her head a little in defeat.

“Bellamy,” she starts, using his full name again. “I’m going to go and make sure Murphy and Raven are okay,”

She’s asking for her brother’s permission, something Clarke doesn’t think she’s ever done before.

He seems uncertain, gaze flitting back to the parking lot because he knows how close they’d already been to a walker.

“I’m okay big brother. I’m armed, and safe. You guys should have some time…”

Clarke curls up into herself a bit, trying to make herself less noticeable so that she doesn’t stand out too much to them.

Bellamy must relent, muttering something about not going too far, and then he’s sliding down to swing his legs over the river bank too, shoulder knocking hers and hand coming up to rest behind her back to brace the pair of them.

“She shouldn’t be running off,” Clarke says, watching the blood still trickling from her split hand.

“I trust her,”

His voice is gruff, but sincere. Clarke’s heart swells at how far he’s come. During the first week they’d spent together, Bellamy would have rather taken a knife to his wrists than lose his sister from his sight. But she is an adult, and she is a more than capable fighter, more of a natural than any of them. She needs to be allowed to take on her own responsibilities.

“Good,”

He passes her one of his t-shirts, takes out a knife from his bag to tear it up, and rips the bottom strip of it for Clarke to take.

She washes it in the water, bending awkwardly to scrub it out.

“I can’t lose my hand,” she says if it isn’t obvious. “I can’t tourniquet it,”

She cleans the wound in the creek next, letting the freezing water rush through and fuse into her veins, diluting her blood and numbing her body intrinsically.

“So your blood isn’t blue then?” he sighs, eyes scrunching disappointedly.

“I guess the joke is up,” she tries to smile, fingers still shaking.

“Never,”

When she can’t stand to feel her skin being pulled by the current any longer, Clarke takes her hand out and wraps the dripping wet cloth around the cut as a form of dressing.

“Can I get another bit?” she asks but he’s already holding a strip of his shirt out to her.

She ties it around the wet one and does it as tightly as she dares.

Once she’s sorted the hand out, pain intensifying now that it’s in contact with fabric, Clarke settles and reaches to swing her bow back over her shoulder, feeling instantly more like herself when it is by her side.

Bellamy’s shoulder is right next to her, so it feels only natural to lay her head on to it. She gazes out to the creek running away from them, and sighs when his head comes to rest gently on top of hers, still worth the weight of the world; pieces of the puzzle coming back together again.

“You’ve got to stop saving my life,” she decides, still not quite finding the smile although it’s somewhere hidden in her words. “It’s doing nothing for my rep.”

He breathes heavily, cheeks lifting against her hair. It’s nice, to know she can still make him smile.

“I must look horrendous,”

Bellamy pulls his head away, examining her face for longer than Clarke would like. Watching her with that same unreadably look in his eyes, he takes his time to come to his conclusion.

Clarke would be blushing if so much blood hadn’t already left her face.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Princess,” he shrugs, head falling back to hers casually.

She blinks, taking in the world around her now that everything isn’t tainted red.

“I’m going to be covered in scars for the rest of my life,”

It’s an odd thing to be sad about, considering how close she’d just become to a walker. It’s not even a sure thing, but even if these scratches fade, she’ll still be left with the memory of them, the memory of being blind.

“They are surface cuts,”

“That’s not what I meant,”

His arm comes up to wrap around her shoulder, stroking its way up and down gently in its own mindless trail.

“I know what you meant,”

There’s quiet. There’s peace.

“I should probably apologize to Raven,” he sighs eventually.

“And Murphy,” Clarke adds on, thinking back to how harshly he’d snapped at him.

“I’ll do it later,” Bellamy decides, thankfully not moving an inch from her side.

If any of them had doubted how Clarke feels about him before all of this, the way she acted must have made it crystal clear.

She needed Bellamy, and only him. He must know what that means, even if she can’t say it out loud.

She can feel it hanging heavy between the minute amount of space between them. He definitely knows. He can’t not know.

“I shouldn’t have had my damn hand on the glass,”

“You weren’t to know,”

“It’s not your fault, Bellamy. You know that right? I’m not going to let you beat yourself up about this,”

He takes a while to reply, chomping down on his jaw aggressively.

“It took me too long,” he breathes out coolly. “I couldn’t even shoot it. I just hit it, like that would have made any sort of difference.”

“It’s okay. You bought us time,”

“If I’d just shot it your hand wouldn’t be this bad. You wouldn’t have had to make it worse,”

“I would have shot it even if it was dead, Bell,”

It’s hard to explain the adrenaline that had been running through her. All she saw was her bow and the arrow in its place before she killed it.

“You were right before,” he whispers. “I can’t take care of you,”

He’s thinking back to the night that he taught her how to shoot. Maybe he doesn’t realize how hard that was for her.

Clarke can’t figure out whether to assure him or dissuade him. If she tries to convince him that he can, her walls will crumble. If she agrees that he can’t, then he’ll be in pieces.

“You shouldn’t have to,” is what she settles on, hoping it’s not too much of a cop out.

Does he not realize that he just saved her life back there? How he brought her back from the edge of fainting from the pain. How he pushed her back like a reflex to wedge himself between her and the walker.

“I want to be strong for you,” Clarke says because he isn’t saying anything. “You like it when I’m strong.”

Bellamy’s head jerks sideways, slipping from hers so that he can see her properly.

“I like it when you’re alive,” he corrects, shaking his head, eyebrows pinched.

“And you are the one who kept me alive,”

“No you are the one who kept you alive,”

“Bellamy,” she huffs, arm coming up to wrap around his body, swinging it under his shoulder. “I don’t know what you want me to say,”

“It’s fine, Clarke,” he pulls her back into him, lungs thumping into her arm. “I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just…”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing princess,”

Clarke wants to push him some more but she’s too tired, and he’s just too warm.

She settles back into the crook of his neck as he takes her hand into his spare one, lifting it to his face, taking his time to touch kisses to each of her fingertips, each point where the ridge of the fabric meets her skin. Every gently peck gives her something back. Something that Clarke hadn’t quite realized she’d lost.

“Shooting is one thing Bell,” she hums when his lips shift down along her fingers. “But you are so much more than that to me. You keep me happy. You give me hope that we’ll be okay,”

His lips flutter against her skin, stilling only for a moment, his breath shaking unevenly.

“You keep me happy too, Clarke,” he whispers, so quietly that she might have just imagined it.

Three pairs of footsteps readily approach from behind her back, but neither of them move. Clarke lets him kiss every single inch of her exposed hand, watches Bellamy as she slumps on to his shoulder, her head lolling back a bit as his cranes forward to reach her.

Mirror images almost. She doesn’t care if the others see them like this. Whatever cards she may have been keeping close to her chest have been played now.

Clarke presses a kiss to his neck, a kiss higher up, a kiss even further to the brink of his jaw. He tastes so much like home, so much like safety. His skin smooth even after everything.

He doesn’t seem disturbed by her cut up face, not in the way she’d expect him to be. He doesn’t look at her like she’s any uglier. He doesn’t kiss her like she is worth any less.

Is this love? If it is, she won’t close herself off to it anymore. She’ll let herself love him.

If he is annoyed that she starts to drift off, Bellamy doesn’t show it. She falls asleep with her palm feeling like it has been turned inside out, her face feeling like it’s so fragile it might just shatter, and her heart feeling so warm it’s about to burst.

And if he hums to her, that same song they danced to a forever ago, the one from the thirties that Clarke scavenged from a move once upon a time, cherished in her magpie memories, then she will hold that close.

 

…

 

The smell of fire wafts over her when Clarke starts to wake up, stopping her toes from quivering. She can feel her campmates surrounding her, wants to know that they’re getting at least some sleep tonight.

She lifts herself up, having to bite down on a yelp when she leans on to her bad hand, forgetting for a second that she has sliced it open.

Clarke mewls to stop the shriek and fails miserably at avoiding the attention of the four of them.

“You should be sleeping,” she sighs as she leans into the blazing fire some more, fiddling with the makeshift dressing at her palm.

Bellamy is sat so close that it only takes a quick shuffle towards her for him to become her sort of chair again. She must have been using him as a pillow while she was asleep, Clarke thinks.

“We aren’t tired,” Raven mumbles, kicking roughly at the fire.

“Sure,” Clarke scoffs.

She leans back into Bellamy, smiling shyly when his arm comes around to her stomach, looping her close.

There is quiet for a while as they all sit and curl around the fire, sapping it for its warmth, but it’s not heavy or loaded with anything other than calmness.

“We boiled some water,” Raven shrugs and hands her a steaming mug. “Thought it might be good for the hand,”

“Thank you,” Clarke says warmly and strips the cloth from around her hand to assess the damage.

It’s too dark to see it clearly. She won’t overreact to the inflamed patches around the edges of the split skin, because maybe that’s just from the cold.

It’ll be good to put some actually clean bandages on to it though. Better to be safe and all that.

Bellamy takes the cloth from her hands before she can dip it in to the water, replacing them with two more strips of the same shirt that he must have cut off while she was sleeping.

Clarke expects him to hand them back to her but he doesn’t, instead waits for her to hold the mug up and proceeds to drop them in and scrub at them roughly between his fingers.

He doesn’t even let her put them back around her hand, which is a bit of a relief because it was a hassle doing it with only one hand the first time.

Taking his time to make sure everything is secure around her palm, Bellamy digs all of his concentration into the process, watching her hand so intently it might turn to flames.

“You’ve really fucked with your face there Griffin,” Murphy says eventually as he smirks across the fire.

Clarke looks to him, smile already sneaking up on her.

“Does it look badass?”

“That’s one word for it,” he hums. She thinks she can see an ounce of relief in his expression but it’s hard to tell in the darkness.

“It’s better without all the blood,” Octavia offers hopefully. “You looked quite scary like that,”

She’s about to argue back when she feels Bellamy whisper into her ear.

“Don’t listen to ‘em,” he mumbles, voice low. “You still look like you,”

“We got your arrows back,”

“You didn’t have to do that,”

“Murphy freaked out a bit,” Raven snorts, her gaze flickering over to Clarke tentatively. “He didn’t get how you managed to shoot two into one eye,”

“I don’t remember…” Clarke answers, her own grin shy as she meets Raven’s stare.

They’ll need to talk, away from everyone else at some point. But Raven isn’t mad.

Bellamy starts humming into Clarke’s ear, absentmindedly as he draws patterns into her stomach, legs either side of her own.

“O, thank you so much for today. You really helped,”

Clarke wants to say more than that but she doesn’t know how to. Murphy and Raven have started talking between themselves so she feels like there’s less pressure for her to gather her thoughts.

Octavia doesn’t seem to mind her clumsiness, instead she looks to Clarke and crooks her head to the side curiously.

“I only cleaned you up,” she shrugs lightly.

“You did more than that,”

Bellamy squeezes his arms a little tighter around her, and Clarke takes the index finger of her good hand to trail its way up his arm, lifting the sleeves of his fleece up so that she can feel more of his skin.

“My face feels like a candy jar,” she mumbles. “Whoever can guess the number of scratches gets the jackpot,”

Octavia smiles at her fondly, then Clarke feels her drift her eyes all over her face to count the cuts as quick as she can.

“Twenty-six,” she decides.

“Thirty-two,” Murphy chirps over, surprising Clarke about the fact that he was even listening in.

Raven looks over quizzically but seems to catch on pretty quickly as she examines Clarke’s face.

“I was kidding,” Clarke squirms, raising her hands to her face to hide from the scrutiny. “I don’t actually need to be reminded that I’ve torn my skin to shreds,”

“Twenty-eight,” Raven guesses, seeming content with her answer.

“Well this feels great,” Clarke laughs.

Bellamy doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to the game, too busy playing with the ends of her shirt. When he slips his fingers under the bottom layer and grazes them along the line of her waistband, Clarke holds her breath.

She digs her nails a little deeper into the skin of his arm. Not really understanding where he’s going with this, what he’s trying to do, Clarke waits in anticipation.

It’s harmless, simply rubbing his hands into the skin of her stomach and across her hipbone, touch featherlight, but it feels way too intimate for him to be doing this here. She grips him some more, taking in the subtle hiss that sounds from his teeth.

His fingers tap their way along her waist and she snuggles closer into him.

“You warmer now?” he mutters, his voice breathy in her ear. Heat is the last of her issues.

“Too warm,” she sulks and turns her face into his neck some more, pressing her nose flush into it.

“What do you mean?” he knows exactly what she means, if the way he smiles into her hair is anything.

“Smugness doesn’t suit you Blake,”

Well, that’s not technically true. Clarke is pretty sure everything is a good look on him.

“You’ve got goose bumps,” he sings at her jaw, smirk obvious, his nails grazing the skin sensitive from his touch.

“What are you doing, Bellamy?”

“I’m making sure you know that you’re still…”

“Still what?” she wonders, turning her face up to him awkwardly.

The other three are caught up arguing about something that Clarke honestly couldn’t care less about right now.

Bellamy hesitates, eyes lifting to the corners like he’s weighing up what he should say. When his gaze flickers back to hers, he is all seriousness. Eyes dark.

“Am I going to be in trouble if I tell you what I’m thinking?” he asks, voice scratchy and delicately quiet.

“Probably,” Clarke tells him. “But that’s never stopped you before.”

“Then I’m just going to tell you that you’re beautiful and-”

“Bell,” she winces, face slumping into his chest as she turns more on to her side.

“No, Clarke. You are beautiful,”

There is so much about this that she wants to argue with. She knows he’s looking at everything with rose-tinted goggles.

They are far enough away from the others for Clarke to be confident that they won’t be overheard.

“And a few scratches on your face take none of that away,”

“Bellamy,”

“I might have been drunk at Christmas, but everything I said was true. I won’t.. I’m not going to risk losing you again before you know that.”

Clarke tries to press the side of her face even more into his chest but Bellamy doesn’t let her get far enough away. He catches her jaw in his hand and tugs her chin so that she has to meet him in the eye again.

When he doesn’t say anything, Clarke’s ears are completely on fire and she knows her cheeks are beet red.

His silent gaze is deafening and Clarke shuffles up some more, hiding from the campfire so that she can push them into the shadows.

She’s thankful for the privacy that the others are giving them; she’d be too embarrassed if she knew she were being listened to.

His eyes are still so intense, so sure of his words.

He’s examining every inch of her skin and it feels like his eyes are playing dot-to-dot with her cuts but when she looks closer, reads him deeper, Clarke can tell he isn’t even seeing her wounds.

“Yeah,” Bellamy says when he doesn’t take his stare away from her eyes, his voice wet. “Beautiful,”

“Your heart,” Clarke chokes, “You don’t understand…”

He smiles, a little wryly, and waits for her.

“I really really don’t want to hurt you Bell. I can’t hurt you. Don’t you get that?”

She’s so high off of the touch of his skin, but at the same time she can’t stay calm. He must know that she loves him by now, must know that this is killing her.

“If I die and you’re, well, we’re… something,”

He winces, his eyebrows drifting down on reflex.

“Clarke, you know you don’t have to say anything now. I can’t see you in pain, not tonight,”

He pulls her head into his chest and she sighs heavily into his hold.

“I’m not in pain anymore,”

“Brave Princess,” Bellamy hums out patiently and presses a kiss to her forehead, leaning them over so that they’re both laying on their sides.

“You are beautiful Bellamy,” she says, feeling more conviction than she thought she was capable of. Clarke thinks back to their night, the one that made all of this so real. “You are everything,”

Because he is. He is everything. And Clarke doesn’t know when the flick switched and he became everything but that doesn’t matter. He has wheedled his way into her cold heart and rooted himself there to stay. He’ll be her everything for as long as she can still think. She’s in love with him.

“Everything,” she coos again, muffling her voice into his neck when he slips his arms under her shoulders. “Is that okay?”

She needs to ask it, because it feels selfish to admit that when she made him promise not to fall in love with her. She hopes he can keep his promise, knowing how raw it feels to have fallen this deeply. And if this is how far her heart has gone, Clarke can’t imagine how far his could go.

“None of this is okay,” he mumbles, lips caressing her ear beneath all of her hair, beneath the shield she is using to protect her from the fire. “I am sick and tired of all of it,”

“I’m sorry,”

Bellamy laughs into her cheek sweetly and slowly. It warms Clarke’s heart to know that he doesn’t feel the need to rush through this glimpse of happiness.

“Why are you sorry?”

“I don’t want to be the reason you’re not okay,”

“You ever gonna get it through that brilliant brain of yours?” he asks. “You are pretty much the only reason I’m still okay.”

Clarke pulls away from him, needing to see his face but she doesn’t go too far, just enough for the tips of their noses to touch.

“Ditto,” she hums, and smiles warmly with her lips shut tightly.

He grins wolfishly, the brown of his eyes dancing and Clarke doesn’t think she’s ever seen a more genuine smile. Maybe it’s because Bellamy knows now that they’re on the same page, maybe it’s because he got her to grin at him. Either way, it is blinding.

“Bellamy?” Clarke asks, lifting her finger to circle over his heart. He makes a sound in response; his eyes having dropped down to follow what she is drawing. “I know you want me to go to sleep but I just want to talk to you,”

“We can talk,” he offers, his words light and absolutely nothing else weighing as little.

“No,” she shakes her head, needing him to understand.  “I want to talk to you for forever,”

“Well,” His hand comes up to hover over her own heart, and it only takes the tiniest nod for him to place his finger oh so gently on to her chest. He mirrors what she’s doing perfectly, doodling the same pattern over the same place. “Can we try something?”

Clarke nods, biting her lip.

“Let’s take it one step at a time. Night by night, and… then I’ll turn that into forever the second I can,”

No pressure, she thinks. Baby steps. It feels like they are agreeing to something, committing themselves to something. But it’s easier than that.

“One step at a time,” Clarke answers, lungs fluttering as his finger drifts along her collar bone and walks its way down to her heart again.

“Now,” he smirks, honey still melting. “I want to hear more about the time your mom forced you to read the bible,”

She’s glad he’s already given up on trying to get her to sleep.

They talk all night long, and Clarke doesn’t think she loses the beaming smile on her face once.

When he makes her laugh so hard that she has to wipe the tears from her eyes, Raven throws a boot over to get them to shut up.

When she makes him recreate his fifth grade talent show performance: a very intense rendition of ‘Closing Time’ by Semisonic, Murphy packs up his stuff and drops down to the opposite side of the fire to get away from them.

Clarke doesn’t see him lose his cheesy, boyish grin. His iridescent eyes never once growing dim.

If he doesn’t know that she’s in love with him by now, then he is definitely an idiot. She doesn’t think she could be more obvious if she tried.

They keep their hands over each other’s hearts and at some point in the night, Clarke is pretty sure their pulses sync up.

Bellamy asks her if she wants to go to sleep when the sun starts to rise, and she finds that she can’t open her eyes after her next blink.

“No,” she whispers, eyelids drifting closed contentedly.

“I’ll be here when you wake up,” he tells her, his other hand smoothing down the hair that he’s been playing with all night long.

“You promise?”

“I promise,”

“I’ve still got so much I want to know,” she smiles, confused as to how she can still need to hear more from him after a dozen hours of straight conversation.

“We’ve got the rest of forever,”

Maybe he’s lying. They both know their lives will be cut short inevitably while they’re living like this. Forever does sound nice though, even if it is too good to be true.

 

…

 

“You go,” Bellamy says easily. “I promised I’d stay with her. I won’t let her wake up without me here,”

Clarke flutters her eyes open, expecting to see harsh beams of sunlight. When the whole world is a darkened blue, she scrubs at them.

“I thought we were up past sunrise?” she asks as she sits up, smiling unbearably at Bellamy. It feels an awful lot like _the_ morning after… just without any of the awkwardness.

“We were. You’ve slept the day away Princess,”

“The whole day!?”

“It’s fine. No one has been complaining. We’ll head back out tomorrow,”

“Okay,” she agrees, stretching out.

Clarke cranes her head around to look for the others, catching sight of Raven’s ponytail in the drop of the creek.

“O and Murphy have gone to get some more wood,” he nods over to the fire, handing Clarke her water bottle.

“You have no intention of letting me help out, do you?”

“None at all,” Bellamy says smugly, unapologetically grinning as he sips from his own mug.

“I’m going to go and wash then. I think I reopened some of my cuts,”

She palms at her face, trying to find all of the streaks of dried blood.

“You need a hand?”

“I’m pretty sure I can manage cleaning my own face, Bell,”

He shrugs and Clarke stands up, rolling her neck out to get rid of the ache from staying in the same place for twenty-four hours.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” she tells him warmly, hoping the smile she’s wearing isn’t too shy, before she jogs over to the creek and hastens to shrugs her fleece off.

This is probably going to freeze her, but she’ll sacrifice some of her body warmth in return for taking away the ick.

“Please tell me you haven’t been swimming in here for long,” Clarke says as she approaches Raven, laying flat on to the river bank on her stomach so she can wet Octavia’s reddened shirt.

“Not too long,” Raven sighs, sounding calm.

She starts to wade over to Clarke and settles to tread water when she reaches the point just in front of her face.

“Let me,” the brunette mutters, taking the t-shirt out of Clarke’s hands and wringing it out before she takes to dabbing it softly over her skin.

“You don’t have to,” Clarke goes to say, but Raven is already working across her face, scrubbing softly at each crisped scab.

“You want to talk about it?”

Raven’s voice is all casual at the core of it, but there is concern lilting at the edges. She’s looking past Clarke’s face over to where Bellamy is poking the campfire on his own.

“I don’t mind,”

“I just want to know,” she says, eyes flickering back to Clarke wearily. “Did you jump in front of him?”

“No. I was already stood at the window. Bellamy pushed me back the second the glass smashed,”

“Then why were there arrows hanging out of its eye and not bullet holes?”

“Because I was the one who shot it. He would have done it if I hadn’t,”

“Can you still shoot?” Raven asks next, face dropping down to Clarke’s blood soaked bandages. It must have reopened at some point in the night, although it didn’t really ever close up.

“Not without making it worse,”

Clarke hasn’t really thought about this yet. If she needs to, she knows she’ll shoot without hesitation. It’d be worth splitting her hand back open in the heat of the moment, but there’s a vulnerability there now, that wasn’t there before.

“Are you mad that I’m pissed off?”

It would feel a bit like an interrogation if Clarke hadn’t been expecting this. Plus it’s Raven. If this had happened to her, Clarke would probably be a flustering mess.

“I’d like to know why,” she answers tentatively, taking in the crease between Raven’s eyebrows.

She doesn’t want Raven to be mad. She hates it when there is tension between the two of them. As always, the brunette seems to read Clarke’s eyes before she can even say anything more and hastens to correct herself.

“I’m not angry with you, Clarke,” she assures confidently, hand softening at the corner of her face. “Me and you are good.”

Clarke is about to relax her shoulders back down, until she sees Raven flick her gaze back over to the fire cautiously.

“Not Bellamy?” she says, disbelieving. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

That’s certainly an understatement. He fixed her yesterday in every way possible.

“Bellamy never does anything wrong in your eyes,” Raven scoffs but her hands are still light on Clarke’s grooved skin.

“What is your problem with him?” Clarke snaps. “You change your mind about him every five seconds. I tell you I can’t do anything about what I’m feeling, and you tell me to take the step forward. And now that I’m actually considering what _you’ve_ encouraged this whole time, you’re doing a whole one-eighty?”

“It’s not that,” she softens.

“Then what is it? I’m not an idiot; I know it’s been tense between the two of you. I just want to know why,”

“When you two came out of that cabin, you looked half-dead Clarke. I barely even recognized you. You had blood pouring all over your face and your wrist was literally streaming. And you didn’t even care. All you cared about was making sure _he_ was okay,”

“That’s not true,”

“I wanted to help you, help clean you up and make sure you weren’t going to lose your fucking hand but all you wanted to do was stand there and _cuddle_ , to make sure his _feelings_ weren’t hurt about the fact that he was hurting you!”

Clarke shifts uncomfortably, head tilting over to look at Bellamy. He’s not even trying to hide how he’s watching her: content and shy and easy.

“You don’t… it wasn’t like that,”

“I’m not mad at you,” Raven says again, a reinforcement to stop things turning completely sour. “But you’re my priority. Not him,”

“That’s not fair,”

“What isn’t fair is Bellamy thinking he can tell me how close I can get to you while you’re in pain,”

“He didn’t mean it like that,”

Clarke feels herself tear into two between the both of them, and only knows that she needs to keep pushing for this to be finished with.

They’re quiet for some time as Raven cleans out the shirt, only to wring it again and repeat the motion.

“You’re in love with him aren’t you?”

It’s a whisper when she asks it.

Clarke doesn’t admit to anything. She knows who she wants to hear her confirm it for the first time. She’ll tell it to Bellamy before she tells it to anyone else. Now that she has hope that she actually can say that to him, the thought doesn’t sound so scary anymore.

“He’s not going to hurt me, Raven. He’s _good_ ,”

“You’re my sister, Clarke. You really are, in all the ways that matter. When my family turned to shit for the hundredth time, you and Isaac were all I had. I came back to New Orleans thinking my life was over and you were the only stable thing I had. I’m not ready to lose you to anyone.”

When Clarke hugs her, she doesn’t mind that Raven is only wearing a dripping wet bra, or that she’ll probably be left with a lude wet patch on her own shirt. She only cares that she can hold Raven tight enough to let her know everything that she wants to say.

“You’re my sister too. You’ve been with me through everything. You’re the one who got me through dad… we will always be family,”

“Am I being selfish?”

“I don’t know,” she gushes honestly. On the one hand, Clarke understands where Raven is coming from. But on the other, she wishes she could just be happy for her.

After they break away from each other, Clarke fiddles with the bandages at her hand, knowing that it is probably time to take a look.

“So have you sucked face yet?”

Clarke chokes when Raven asks her, eyes flashing up to smack her good hand against Raven’s mouth.

“What?” she startles, her eyebrows pulling together again, lips twisting against Clarke’s palm. “You were up all night, weren’t you?”

“We were,” Clarke smiles shyly. “But we’re going to have to take things slow,”

“Please,” Raven snorts. “There’s nothing slow about where either of you two are at,”

“Sure. This feels safer though. God, Raven, we spent hours just talking,”

Although Raven tries to look annoyed, it’s impossible not to match Clarke’s infectious grin.

“I know. You two were keeping all of us awake with your stupid giggles,”

“We weren’t giggling,”

“You were definitely giggling,”

Clarke’s about to quip something back but the words get lost in her tongue. She takes in the sight of her exposed hand for the first time, having left the makeshift bandages alone since Bellamy had fixed them up for her.

She doesn’t know how it’s possible for her mood to change so quickly and yet the breath leaves her lungs in seconds, replacing all of her sweet bliss with stark cold fear.

The edges of the cut have start to curl up, crisping with dead skin. Along the slit, her whole palm has started to turn rosy, inflamed like she’s cut through a burn. And if that’s not all the warning sign she needs, a crusty yellow substance has started to gather at the beginning and end.

“Shit,” she mumbles, not able to find any other words on her own lips.

“What is it?”

There’s no time to answer before Raven gasps.

She takes Clarke’s hand in both of hers and lifts it into the fading light some more.

“This isn’t bad, right? This is fixable,”

It’s pretty bad, Clarke thinks reluctantly. Now that she can see the infection, it’s like the pain wakes her up to how dangerous this actually might be.

She sits frozen, trying to trace every possible threat this might pose, every treatment she might be able to salvage, every ounce of damage that she might be able to dodge.

“Um,”

“We boiled the bandages. O cleaned the cut while you were asleep,”

Well that’s a new piece of information, but it’s irrelevant now.

“We haven’t got any antiseptic, no clean bandages. I knew this might happen,” Clarke shrugs, knowing that if she doesn’t keep the nonchalance in her voice then she’ll start to panic.

Raven’s eyes meet hers, so different from their easy joking only moments ago. This is battle station mode. This is survival instinct kicking into full gear.

“Clarke, this could be serious,”

She nods wordlessly, gaze flickering down to see her own fingers quiver, feeling like they’re not even a part of her body anymore.

“I’ll boil some more water and clean the cloth out. It might stop it from getting any worse…”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we get to Vancouver,” Clarke decides.

“Clarke,” Raven warns again, fear creeping up into her expression. “Don’t play this down,”

“Give it time. It might just… heal on its own,”

She’s not an idiot. She knew there had been the possibility of getting an infection, but Bellamy had been her perfect distraction.

“Where’s that damn moonshine when you need it?”

Even mentioning the moonshine as flippantly as this makes Clarke think of Bellamy, and her head whips around frantically.

“We can’t tell them,” she whispers, unsurprised at how devastated she sounds.

“Clarke you have to,”

“No,”

She thinks about how happy they both were through the night. How safe they’d made each other feel. She won’t be the one to take that away from him, not for a bit of blistering that could mean nothing.

If this gets dangerous then she’ll tell him. It might help keep her calm to be around people who are blissfully unaware of this.

“I can handle it. I’ll just get some antibiotics when we get to Vancouver,”

Raven looks like she’s about to argue back but she seems to think better of it eventually, instead choosing to let her face say everything. It’s really not that big a deal, no more than any other infection would be.

“Keep an eye on it,” is all she says, missing out everything she really wants to let loose, and she sets about to finish cleaning Clarke’s face off, humming her way through it peacefully.

 

…

 

Octavia offers for Clarke to go hunting with them a bit later, when the night has been flooded of all of its color.

She asks how they expect to catch anything, waving her freshly bandaged hand over in apology.

Clarke has managed to avoid Bellamy for the past few hours, still grinning obnoxiously every time he so much as looks in her direction, but if she sits down and really talks to him then she knows that she’ll spill the truth about her hand.

He’s been biting back his smile all day. Clarke thinks it’s probably the most adorable thing she’s ever seen.

Apparently Bellamy told Raven how to set up some snares earlier this morning. His sister drops the hint that he refused to leave his spot next to Clarke but talked her through it for a couple of hours until Raven could do it on her own.

“And why didn’t we do this earlier?” she asks as she reaches down to lace her boots awkwardly. Her fingers seem to have a mind of their own, the skin of them feeling disconnected from every other part of her body.

“Didn’t need to,” Octavia shrugs, gesturing over to Clarke’s bow.

“Yeah sure, I’ll come and see if you’ve managed to catch anything,”

Clarke picks up Murphy along the way, having been told he’d slept nearly as much as she had through the day, and knowing if he is left to his own devices, Murphy will happily stay slumped against the fire for as long as he can.

Now that she’s having to use strips of Bellamy’s shirts as bandages, Murphy keeps looking down to his sling guiltily when he doesn’t know that she is looking. As he’s using the last one that Clarke had, he must feel like he’s taking something away from her.

“So we’ve got eight actually functioning hands between the five of us now,” Clarke smirks and steps on his foot in the hopes it might get him to ease up.

“Hey, my hand still works. It’s just the bone connected to it that doesn’t…”

“Semantics,”

“Can you still shoot?”

His voice is steady, not really giving anything away.

“Not without reopening the cut,”

She has injured the hand that she normally uses to carry her bow. Being left-handed, she’s had to grow up with a certain level of ambidexterity, and if she has to, Clarke might be able to trade hands to shoot. Still though, her hand is pretty fragile and she’d rather not risk it.

“That sucks,”

“Yeah,”

Thinking about it now, it really does suck.

“Murphy stop bumming me out,” Octavia snaps light-heartedly as she kicks at a confusing arrangement of twigs and knotted grass.

“It’s not my fault Clarke jumped in front of a window,”

“I didn’t jump,”

“Hmph,” he sounds, rolling his eyes. “Semantics,”

“Hey!” Octavia squeals in a rush, running up to a tree that must have some sort of snare tangled up around it. “Jackpot!”

She pulls from it a small rabbit, no bigger than the size of her own head as she swings it up high like a trophy.

“Cool,” Murphy nods, and Clarke doesn’t think he could look less interested if he tried. “Now we can go and warm up,”

“No, there’s two more around here somewhere…”

“Over there?” Clarke asks, pointing her head over to a place that she thinks she can recognize a similar pyramid of sticks.

“You two go ahead. I can’t feel my toes,”

Murphy slinks away before either of them can argue about him pulling his weight, practically sprinting back to camp with a shiver in his step.

“You wimp!” Octavia shouts after him but he doesn’t bother to respond. “Me and Clarke don’t need you anyway!”

Clarke heaves a sigh, the corners of her mouth lifting when she turns to see O’s scowl.

“He was just slowing us down,” she nods and moves toward the other trap that Raven must have set up.

There’s nothing in the other two, but at least they’ve caught something. They won’t have to worry about looking for food tonight.

“You’re quiet,” Clarke smiles as they start to make their way back towards the camp.

“Never,”

“What’s up?”

Octavia breathes heavily and stops on her feet, forcing Clarke to turn and face her.

“I’m trying to figure out when to give you the sister talk?” O says it lightly, but her face is all contorted, all confused.

“The what?” Clarke laughs, stepping closer to listen.

“Well I’ve never had to do this before, and it’s not like I’d be able to intimidate you even if I wanted to,”

It dawns on her comically slow. It’s strange because it’s like Octavia isn’t even trying to put up a front, like she wants Clarke to work with her on this.

“Ah. This is about Bell,”

“I figured something might have happened considering you two were giggling all night,”

Clarke sighs, stomping her foot petulantly as she mutters a rough “We weren’t _giggling_ ,”

Octavia steams past it, trying to rush her way through whatever she has to say because Clarke has a feeling she doesn’t really want to do it.

“Bellamy’s a lot better at giving this talk. He’s had to do it a lot more. He’d do it whenever I’d so much as look at another guy, but I’ve never gotten to see him want something more for himself so… I guess this is a first for both of us,”

Clarke zips her mouth shut, knowing her eyes are grinning at the thought of Octavia’s oncoming warning.

“I know I don’t have to say any of this. Even if it still hasn’t sunk in for him, I can see how deeply you’re into him. You get this stupid blush on your cheeks every time he so much as smiles at you,”

Clarke gapes and hastens to cut in, trying to make it clear that she really isn’t as pathetic as it must seem- even if she’s wrong- but Octavia holds up a hand, her eyebrows still pinched painfully.

“Don’t worry, he’s just as bad. I swear you two have turned even this into a competition. Who can get the biggest heart eyes or something… anyway that’s not the point,”

Clarke smiles again and folds her arms as she waits.

“Okay I’m just gonna get this over with: if you break his heart then I’ll have to hurt you Clarke. He doesn’t give the opportunity to many people so I can’t let you take advantage,”

“That sounds fair,” Clarke nods once.

“It does?”

“If I break his heart then I’ll probably want to hurt me too,” she answers honestly.

“I know. That’s why you two are so disgustingly adorable,”

Octavia must feel like this won’t be finished without a hug, because she’s wrapping Clarke up in her arms before the blonde can even take it in.

“I know you won’t hurt him,” she whispers warmly. “I just had to say it,”

“I know, O,”

“Plus, Bell’s already had to hear that from two people. I figured it was time to even up the numbers,”

Clarke snaps her head back.

“Two?”

Octavia smiles cheekily, nodding her head harshly over to the campfire.

“You’d be surprised about how much Murphy cares for you, Clarke,”

Clarke can only shake her head, lost as to why Murphy would even bother going to the effort of sitting Bellamy down for this kind of conversation. She always thought he’d kept himself to himself, not caring about the turbulence between the two of them.

“I don’t…”

“You take care of him, but you don’t like, push him into it. And you were the first person he saw in Nebraska. _And_ you were the one who fought so hard to get him out of there. He’s not ignorant to that,”

“I wish I could have seen it,” Clarke smiles, a wave of affection for the weasel-faced man flooding through her. She can’t quite picture Murphy, someone with only one working arm and a muscle content practically half of what Bellamy carries, threatening the larger man.

“Me too. I had to listen to Bell moan about how tempted he was to punch him in the face for forever. He looked smug for the rest of the day though; I reckon he quite liked being warned to treat you right.”

“God he’s such a nerd. When did this even happen?”

“Christmas,” is all she answers.

The day in which Clarke had no recollection of the night before, how the memories had waited until Christmas evening to seep back in properly. And how it’d been too awkward to even bridge the subject to Bellamy, who was acting like nothing happened. At least she knows now that that was just because he thought she couldn’t remember… which was true, if only for a few hours.

“O, my hand is infected,”

It comes out like a whisper and it shocks Clarke when she says it, like the words swam past her brain completely and flooded their way to her tongue.

“What?”

“It’s, it’s not a big deal. But you should know just… in case,”

Octavia’s eyes grow ten times wider.

“Just in case what?” her voice shrivels up.

“Just in case I can’t keep it under control,”

“I take it he doesn’t know yet?” she swallows harshly, nodding over to her brother.

“I can’t take today away from him,”

“He’d rather know,”

Clarke winces and nods. She does know that. She knows she’s got to tell him, and she has to do it before the cut gets any worse.

“I think he’s down by the bridge,” Raven’s voice hovers over from where Clarke left all of her stuff.

She doesn’t even stop to scold Raven for eavesdropping. It takes one look from Octavia to give Clarke the confidence that she needs to tell him.

Whatever her and Bellamy are now, she doesn’t want to start it off with a lie, or secrets that might turn into something worse.

When Clarke brushes past Murphy, she does take the time to kick him in the shins. Just because if she doesn’t do that, then she’ll do something else, something stupid like hug him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'I don't want to run from a bullet,'  
> \- Candlelight, Zhavia


	16. Watch me stumble over and over

He’s shrouded in moonlight. It should be impossible to attract light so much like this in the pitch darkness. He must really be turning into her lighthouse, her homing beacon.

Clarke takes a seat next to him. He’s got his legs swinging through the gaps between the wooden railings, feet pointed towards the midnight black water.

She mirrors Bellamy, her own legs coming to rest easily in the spaces next to his.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he whispers after Clarke has nudged his shoulder to let him know she’s here.

He doesn’t sound sad though. Just curious; amused.

“Yeah,” Clarke tells him, because there’s no point in hiding it.

She starts unraveling the bandages around her hand, hoping he can’t really see what she’s doing yet.

“Are you having… second thoughts?” about him? never.

She doesn’t answer him because his question is ridiculous. Clarke passes over her hand, scared to even look at it in fear of what she might see.

Bellamy takes a moment to notice what she’s doing but startles as he sees what she’s offering him.

His fingers wrap around the back of her palm, and he cradles it, eyes running over the gash that only looks more inflamed.

It’s started to hurt a lot more, stinging a different kind of pain to when she first got it.

Not saying anything, Bellamy takes the slice through her palm in and Clarke leans her head on to her extended arm, waiting and watching the trickling water.

“You mad?” she asks when she can’t stand his silence anymore. “I get it if you’re mad,”

“I’m not mad,” he answers instantly. His voice is so quiet.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to tell you. I don’t want to overreact about nothing and you seem happy right now I just thought it’d be bett-”

“This isn’t a big deal though, right?”

He sounds hopeful even if the crack in his throat is beginning to betray him.

“It’s just… a little infected,”

“Sure,” Clarke nods, having to bob her head so that she can convince herself. “Just a little,”

His silence tells her that she hasn’t done a very good job of reassuring him.

“Okay,” he says after a while. “Then we get to Vancouver before it gets to more than just a little,”

“Okay,”

It’s definitely more than just a little. The yellow crust is running in one distinct line around the gaping cut, seeping white at the very corners. And the rest of her palm is a burning red.

“You know it’s not just a little right?”

“Yeah, Clarke. I know,”

“I knew it needed stitches. I should have just used a knife or something. It was my face and the pain, and all the blood, I just wasn’t thinking straight. What a fucking idiot. My hand is literally hanging open and I thought running it through a stream would be good enough,”

“It’s all we could do,” Bellamy tells her, gripping her wrist in his fingers tighter when he swings his arm around her waist and pulls her in.

She hadn’t realized how much space she’d put between them but as he tugs her into his chest, Clarke struggles to remember why.

“We are not going to lose you. Don’t even start thinking like that,”

“It’s a risk though Bell. I knew this would happen eventually,”

“Hey, we’ll be fine. We really will be. Are you in pain?”

Clarke doesn’t know how he sounds so sure, not when he’s got clear proof of her infection.

“It’s bearable,” she tells him. She can handle this kind of hurt.

“That’s not an answer,”

“It’s only been a day and it’s already this bad. I don’t, I don’t have any way to treat it,”

“Clarke look at me,”

She lifts her head from his shoulder and meets his eyes reluctantly. His face is set, determined, and his eyes aren’t scared at all.

“I’m going to get you to Vancouver,”

He sets his hand to the edge of her shirt, rubbing the tips of the fabric between his fingers gingerly.

Clarke settles her good palm into his chest, to stop herself from falling into it.

“You have no idea how much I want to kiss you,” she feels the words fall from her lips, bypassing her mind again. Her eyes are already focused to his mouth like a moth drawn to a flame.

He startles in surprise, clearly not expecting her to say that. He recovers pretty quickly though and smiles so softly, so contagiously that Clarke catches it.

“Yeah,” he tells her, something caught in his throat. “Princess, I really do,”

She drifts forward, no longer holding herself back against his chest and using it now as a lever to brace herself.

“Your sister gave me the talk,” she mumbles when her face falls inches from his.

“About the birds and the bees?” he asks, smirking.

“Not quite… more of an ‘I will avenge my brother’s heart if I have to,’ kind of talk,”

He hums, swiping his thumb under her shirt to grace the bare skin. Clarke’s flaming hand lands palm up on his leg as he takes his other hand to lift it up to her jaw, cupping it and pulling her towards him some more.

“You know Raven hates me at the minute, right?”

“She doesn’t hate you,” Clarke tells him, rolling her eyes at his dramatics.

“I heard her cock her gun while you were asleep. I wouldn’t put it past her to start using me for target practice right now,”

“She’s just protective. She knows that you are nothing but trouble,”

Bellamy is still tugging her in closer, leading with her chin and Clarke’s fingers dance up his pec to the skin of his collarbone.

“You’re one to talk,” he smirks, that stupidly happy smirk that makes her stomach flutter.

“I know what you’re doing Bell,” she says when her nose touches his. “It’s not working,”

“It’s working for me,”

He admits it sheepishly, undeterred.

“Distractions aren’t going to help anything,”

“This isn’t a distraction,”

Clarke takes her face from his hand, and rolls on to her knees to get a level up on him. He watches her, gaze darkening, neck craning up to her.

Turning her leg over his, straddling his lap with confidence she didn’t know she has. He saps it up, eyes roaming all over her.

Clarke throws her injured arm over his shoulder, so that the gash doesn’t make contact with anything, and she can still put this arm to some use, hooking her forearm around his neck.

He leans in naturally and Clarke places the tips of her fingers to his cheekbone. Sharp enough to cut glass. His jaw locks in waiting. She wants to know how hard he bites.

When his palms lifts from the skin of her waist to wriggle underneath the clothes at her back, Clarke feels her eyes flutter closed, and she lets out a sharp hiss.

“Bellamy your hands are freezing,” she scolds, the skin of her arm rubbing against the back of his neck.

“Do that again,”

It isn’t a question. It’s low and rough and demanding.

“Do what?”

He nods to her lips, head rolling forward like he’s being drawn by magnets.

“Make that sound,”

When she is too high off of his breath, he grows impatient and scrapes his nails across the skin of her back. She can’t help it. The air escapes her lips in another small hiss.

“Don’t look so smug,” she mutters, knowing his expression even with his forehead pressed to her mouth. “It’s the cold.”

“It’s trouble,”

“It is the cold,”

Bellamy tears his face away from her lips, and the small whimper that he takes from her with it isn’t even embarrassing. He roams his eyes back up to hers, examining them with a dopey smile on his face.

“I’m going to get you to Vancouver. Your hand will be better than it’s ever been and when we do this for real, I’m not going to let it just be a distraction. This is too good. You deserve better than this,”

His fingers dance even further up her back, traveling so high that he starts to pinch at the edge of her bra. The layers she’s wearing are starting to lift up, exposing oversensitive skin to ice-cold chills.

“Are those Murphy’s words?”

“Please,” he sighs, head falling back to hers for just a second. “Please don’t talk about Murphy right now,”

“Sorry,” she laughs, breathlessly. “Not trying to kill the mood.”

He sighs again and rolls his head back to look at her.

“We should probably just talk,”

As he says it, his fingers pinch harder against her bra strap.

“That sounds smart,” she answers, rolling her hips against his thighs a little impatiently.

He groans as she does so, but Clarke stays where she’s sat. If she wriggles forward anymore then she’ll be pressing against him completely.

“I don’t really want to talk,” he admits into her cheek, mouth wide open.

“Me neither. You want to kiss me, Bell?”

“More than anything,”

She grinds down on his leg again, humming desperately against his hair.

“I won’t stop though. I kiss you and I won’t stop. I won’t be strong enough,”

“I won’t want you to stop,”

“But you deserve better,” he tells her. His decision is final, she can hear it beneath the desire in his voice.

“Clarke,” he whispers and lets one of his hands fall to the small of her back. “Stop,”

She does, but doesn’t move off of him.

When Bellamy looks into her eyes again, she reads the words written out in permanent marker, there in the depths of his soul. Not tonight.

Clarke flushes, heat spreading from the center of her stomach and scattering to every other part of her body. She goes to swing her leg back off his, knowing that this isn’t going to go any further.

“Wait,” he mumbles, hand catching her thigh in a panic. “Stay,”

“I’m here Bell,” she coos, hand drifting back down to his neck.

“No, stay like this. I want to feel you as much as I can,”

Clarke considers him, weighs up whether her own willpower is strong enough for her to stay in this position and not do anything about it. She decides if this is what he needs, then she’ll make it strong enough.

Suddenly words feel meaningless. Now all she wants is to breathe him in for as long as she can. The sting in her palm has started to numb, regardless of the blistering still growing around it. If the clock on her days is ticking then she wants to spend it like this, just like this.

In the arms of the man she loves.

…

Clarke wakes up in the middle of the night, teeth chattering and toes quivering. They’re strewn across the length of the bridge, and she has her face pressed tightly into Bellamy’s shirt. The jacket he is wearing wrapped around her too.

She knows instantly that something is wrong. Even more wrong. She feels gross, a fever burning through her that definitely wasn’t here a couple hours ago.

His fingers are rubbing softly at her scalp, his other hand dancing at the small of her back in his sleep.

She’s got her hands in between the two of them and when she presses gently at his chest, she cries out in pain. Shit. Her palm.

He must have bandaged it back up after she fell asleep, Clarke thinks as her eyes catch on the torn gray fabric.

She’s scared to even look at it.

There is sweat lining the nape of her neck, and towering at her crown: not a good sign at all considering how cold she feels.

“Clarke?”

It’s a whisper, a moan that belongs somewhere in whatever dream he’s having. What is she like in his dream?

She tries to stretch out her hand, testing it for how far she can move it but it is a mistake because she can’t escape the next whimper.

“Clarke?” he mumbles again, eyebrows pinched in pain.

“I’m here, Bell,” she tells him and reaches up to card her fingers over his cheek. “I’m only here,”

“You aren’t,”

He’s still asleep, clearly. His voice is so childlike, so innocent.

“You aren’t going to stay with me,”

It’s muffled, but she manages to distinguish the words after some time.

“I’ll try,”

“Not… good enough,”

“I know,” she lets up, fingers tapping against his lips to stop him from saying anything else. “It never is.”

His lips purse and he leans into her thumb, pecking at it lazily, sleepily.

She watches fondly, grinning a little apologetic despite the cold sweat lining every inch of her skin.

He kisses her thumb some more in his slumber before he shifts his face down to trail his lips up towards the back of her hand. The only good one she’s got.

His mouth comes to rest at the top of her wrist.

When he makes a sound, guttural but sweet at the same time, Clarke flutters her eyes closed.

“You are so much trouble,” she whispers, knowing that that still isn’t enough.

They can’t stay here. They aren’t close enough to the others for both of them to be safe. And without her bow, Clarke can’t defend him. She tries not to feel lost without it, and tries not to resent her damn hand when she strokes a little harder at his face.

“Bell we need to move,”

He grunts in his sleep and rolls into her some more.

“We aren’t safe here,”

“You’re safe with me,”

“No. Come on, Bell, we’ll get some rest at the fire,”

There is a bead of sweat trailing its way down her ear and she knows it’s not from being so close to him.

She pushes away from Bellamy and the loss of her hold seems to wake him up like a bucket of water being thrown over him.

“Hey,” he mutters, wiping a hand over his face as she stands.

“Come on,” Clarke nods over to the camp in their sights and doesn’t wait for him to stand up too before she starts heading that way.

As she takes the first few steps forward, Clarke stumbles, unsteady on her feet, and she has to catch herself on the wooden beam at the end of the bridge. When both of her hands fall to the beam, she cries out again and instantly feels the blood start to soak through the bandages.

“Clarke?” Bellamy asks, voice thick from the tiredness and she turns to him, knowing her face has twisted painfully, but she can’t take the grimace away.

Her forehead is burning up, her mind dizzy and all over the place.

The look on her face must sober him completely as he strides towards her and takes her full weight into his arms.

Before he can so much as take her in, Clarke forces her way out of his grip and swings over the side of the bridge, clutching to it with both hands and vomiting over the side of it urgently.

She hasn’t eaten a lot today, so she basically just throws up an amalgamation of bile and water. As soon as she’s rid of her stomach contents, Clarke’s cry turns into a shout and she knows her blood is staining the wood, gushing out the tighter she grips.

His hands come up to her face from behind, and he pulls her hair away from it, carding it through his fingers and gathering it into a quick ponytail to stop it from dirtying.

She grabs at the sleeve of her fleece, wipes it roughly over her mouth in disgust and breathes heavily at the creek.

Fever. Cold sweat. Nauseous. Sleepless. Dizzy. Not to mention all the problems with the wound.

The symptoms are setting in too quickly. She thought she’d have more time than this. She needs more time than this.

“Clarke,” his voice cracks.

“Don’t touch me,” she begs, not able to stand him seeing her like this. “I can fight this,”

“Let’s get you into the light. Let me take a look,”

She turns to him and closes her eyes, breathing in as deeply as she dares so that she doesn’t provoke her unsteady stomach.

“I can walk,” Clarke tells him and spins on her heels, clutching still at the bridge handle and ignoring the mind-numbing pain.

She takes a few steps forward, enough to get off the platform that feels like it’s jostling at a hundred miles an hour. It only takes another couple of yards for her to fall to her knees.

His hands land on both her shoulders the second she hits the ground.

“Bell! I can do it on my own!”

Clarke shrugs him off roughly, her ears blaring out white noise that comes from nowhere. When she clambers up to her feet, she has to double step the rest of the way, skipping and tumbling each time her boot catches on thin air.

She hears Bellamy following tentatively behind her, growling each time she tells him to back away.

He reaches boiling point when she reaches the fire, coming way too close to landing directly into the flames before his hands shoot back out and loop around her waist, swinging her all the way around and steadying her by leaning her back.

It’d be like their dance if she didn’t feel like death warmed up.

“Holy shit!” Murphy seethes when he sees the tips of her hair barely scratch the rising flames. “What did you do to her?”

Bellamy releases another warning growl through his clamped lips and now that he has his fingers wrapped firmly around her, he’s not going to let go.

Clarke curls up into herself, her skin prickling with burning hot ice.

“Her cut is infected… I don’t know what this is…”

Bellamy sounds panicked, but she weaves in and out of listening.

“Here, get her down,”

There is some shuffling around her as Bellamy keeps her pressed tightly, limp against his chest.

“I swear she was fine a couple hours ago,”

A hand presses against her forehead- too small and unsteady to be Bellamy’s- and another pair cradles her head to rest it against something soft.

“She’s burning up,” Murphy decides.

His head is closer than she’d have expected. There is heavy breathing coming from either side, fingers rubbing soothingly into her scalp and the other hand flat against her brow.

“But she’s shivering,”

“I don’t know what to do,”

“Wake Raven up,” Bellamy gruffs out.

There is some more shuffling around her but Clarke doesn’t think she can stay awake any longer. She feels herself fall into the steady arms of sleep more and more as another voice approaches.

Her teeth are chattering so violently that they might just smash under the pressure.

Swearing. Lots of it as she nods in and out of consciousness.

You need to give me water, she thinks. That’s what she’d do first. It’s a step in the right direction. If only she had the ability to say anything.

“It shouldn’t… this bad,”

When something tugs at the bandage, more liquid than it is cloth anymore, there is a sharp gasp from somewhere.

What must it look like? Has dead skin started to turn black around it? Has the blistering swollen to the point of popping?

She feels herself whisper something but can’t even register it.

Cold drips down on to her forehead, someone shouts something, another pair of hands land somewhere around her head, and she decides to focus on the pillow of a soaking wet t-shirt that presses tightly to her face.

“Clarke stay awake,” whoever that is, they have a nice voice.

“I’m awake,” she mumbles.

She’d rather just not have her hand anymore, she decides, she’d take anything over the pain right now.

A smile graces her lips, but she doesn’t know why. Her nerves feel like they’re being electrified.

“Open your eyes, Princess,”

She does as she’s told. Whoever is speaking sounds too frantic to ignore.

Clarke’s vision is cloudy, and she winces when all she sees are stars. She can’t tell if they’re real or not.

“Ouch,” she whispers when something sharp digs into her palm. “That doesn’t feel too good,”

Murphy’s face hovers over her, his hand on her head shaking subtly.

When he catches her eye in his work, Clarke pleads with him.

“I’m going to sleep. Some sleep will get me better. I can fight this on my own,”

She doesn’t process anyone else around her, doesn’t know how many of them are working away. He’s all she can see in her line of sight, so he is all she focuses on.

“Murphy I’m going to go to sleep,”

He seems to watch her anxiously. When he nods, his eyelids get a little heavier, or maybe hers do.

“Okay Clarke. You’ll be fine,”

“I am fine,” she argues, tutting her teeth, disappointed. “I already told you I can fight this,”

There is another shout. It makes Clarke squeeze her eyes tighter.

Something digs into her hand again, surely hitting bone by now.

There isn’t much else she remembers.

…

Drums. She likes the sound of drums. They are booming steady, constant and reassuring in her ears. She waits for a cymbal to be struck but the clash never comes. All that she hears is the low bass of something kicking.

The sound is echoing through her as she starts to fade in and out of her own head. It takes way too long for her to realize that she isn’t actually listening to drums. She should have known that Bellamy Blake’s heart is too loud for that.

Clarke wriggles into the noise some more, but the movement makes her take note of the lack of solid ground beneath her back.

Instead, her weight is pressing into Bellamy’s arms, hooked under her shoulders and legs and holding her, cupping her so that her body is curled around his chest, ear shoved tightly into his rib cage.

He’s carrying her, his footsteps brisk and determined. Clarke doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep for, all she knows is the fire in the temples of her skull and the burn in her hand.

She feels so small in his arms.

Clarke can’t open her eyes, already squinting from the pain of daylight before she has so much as blinked.

She hums into Bellamy’s chest, more of a mewl when she actually hears it because it sounds pained even to her own ears.

“Bell?” she asks with a hoarse voice as the words tear through her crackled throat.

“You’re okay, Clarke,” he says back and jostles her softly to get her sitting more comfortably. “I’ve got you,”

She opens her eyes, only to be met with the inky black of one of his t-shirts.

“Where are we going?”

She doesn’t know where the others are, doesn’t know if their footsteps are surrounding her or if his are just echoing through her head.

“We’re getting you to Vancouver,”

He sounds cautious and tired, like he’s not gotten any sleep in weeks.

Clarke feels awkward now that she’s awake, like a baby being carried.

“Put me down Bell. I can walk,”

“Last time you said that, you almost fell into a fire,”

“I just wasn’t feeling great,”

He heaves a sigh but flips her over to her feet without another word. His hands drift to Clarke’s arms, rubbing her shoulders as she regains her balance.

She feels herself tip on her toes slightly, trying to get her knees to stop buckling. Once she’s sure she won’t fall over, Clarke looks up at Bellamy.

His eyes are melting into hers, examining her face all over to check for any warning signs.

“Where,” she says, croaking her way through her acid wrecked throat. “Where are we?”

She turns her head away from him dazedly and catches sight of the other three nearby, fallen behind only a little. When they see that she’s stood, however clumsily, the three of them hasten to catch up.

Clarke catches Raven’s eye.

“We’ve been walking all night,” Bellamy gruffs out, passing her a water bottle.

Clarke takes it hungrily, smacking her dried out lips together as she realizes how thirsty she is.

When she takes it into her fingers, Clarke remembers that her shoulders feel a lot lighter than they should do, and she panics for a few moments in search of her stuff.

Then she takes in the added lump on his shoulders and realizes he’s not just got his bag on his back but hers as well.

“Where’s my bow?” she asks, barely taking in how much weight he must have been carrying with her in his arms too.

“Raven’s got it,”

Clarke turns around again, just in time to see Raven rush over and take her shoulders from Bellamy’s grip, practically shaking Clarke out in her assessment.

The spin makes Clarke stumble over, her head hanging heavy and her stomach flipping over itself as she starts to fall over.

Another pair of hands come to land at her hip and Clarke jerks her head up to see Octavia’s focused and set expression, arms reaching out to prepare to catch her.

“I need my bow,” is all Clarke can say.

When she reaches forward in front of her, Clarke catches sight of the bandaged hand in her periphery. She becomes distracted with the exposed rosy skin, and drifts in and out of dizziness as she brings her hand back to look at it.

As she peels away the admittedly cleaner layers, Clarke has to swallow a gag at the sight of the slash in her palm. There is no blackened skin, but there is puss leaking out of it, trickling down across her hand.

The magnet that draws her eyes away from the cut is the heavy red rash at the base of her wrist. An infection is one thing. This isn’t just that anymore. This is spreading like a tumor, working its way towards her arm maliciously.

She remembers treating a baby with blood poisoning in her days working in the central hospital. He didn’t make it.

“How long have I been out?” she asks through a whisper.

Clarke feels herself rock on her feet, her vision swamping with clouds that aren’t there.

“Symptoms shouldn’t be this bad. Infections don’t kick in like this in a couple of days,”

“We haven’t got time to think about that now,” Murphy says as he swings his bag back over his shoulders. “We need to get you somewhere safe,”

She hasn’t even got time to take in a breath before Bellamy’s arms are swinging to the backs of her knees. Scampering away awkwardly, Clarke trips backward over her own feet.

“I can walk Bell. I’m not a cripple,”

She tries to say it affectionately but it just comes out like a snotty mess. She’ll keep herself strong for as long as she can.

He watches her carefully, his eyes flashing to try to figure out whether he should let her go on her own. There’s no arguing about it though. Clarke doesn’t want to be made to feel like a patient meant for a sickbed, and so he won’t do that.

When they set off, Clarke falls back to Murphy, unable to compose herself over Bellamy’s cautious gaze and remembering that they were the only two faces she saw last night.

“You wanna talk me through what’s actually wrong with me?” she asks quietly and kicks him with her boot just because.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the doctor?”

“I don’t… I don’t remember a lot of last night,”

“It wasn’t pretty,” he shrugs, eyes on the ground. “You aren’t going to faint on me now, are you? If you are, you might want to hover around someone who can catch you,”

Murphy nods forward roughly to the other three, who all keep swiping glances back when they don’t know Clarke can see. She quite likes being around someone who she can’t really rely on right now though. It makes her feel a sense of independence, like she needs to take care of herself.

“I won’t pretend that I’m not feeling like shit, but I’d rather just… know,”

“Um…” he scratches at his neck a bit uncomfortably, wriggling with the sling at his arm. “I mean you almost fell into a fucking fire Clarke. If Bellamy hadn’t been there… yeah, I guess you were just all over the place. Burning up, kinda out of it, throwing up. Raven tried to clean your hand out; she had to dig out all these pieces of dust and glass that were buried,”

“I remember that,”

Yeah, she does. That was excruciating.

“It’s blood poisoning isn’t it?”

“Probably,”

“And, people can, um, die from that?”

“Yeah,” a lot.

They are falling behind steadily, the space between them and the others getting larger and larger. No one says anything, and Murphy doesn’t tell anyone when she falls over nothing but her own toes.

Her fever climbs throughout the day and her teeth only chatter more and more, cold sweats steaming from places she didn’t know she could sweat from, like the skin of her shoulders and the curve of her cheeks. Clarke throws up behind a tree after they try to get her to eat the few nettles that Raven finds. When Octavia suggests that they all stop for a few hours to get some rest, Clarke is insanely grateful for the respite.

She offers to take watch but it’s a futile endeavor with the four of them all pouncing on her before she can even so much as finish her sentence.

Clarke thinks it starts raining at some point, but she feels half-dead so can’t really take any of the surrounding environment in. It doesn’t matter though because she already knows she’s as cold as she could possibly get.

Raven and Octavia are surprisingly the two that are able to keep their heads to the full extent. Raven always having an ability to work things like this out carefully and logically.

Clarke has avoided Bellamy all day long, not by choice but every time he looks at her, her heart cracks. He just looks so tired, so on the edge of crashing that she doesn’t think she can take it.

He does try to mother her, but Clarke shoves him away each time, nothing but soft and thankful, but she needs to keep her distance nonetheless.

There’s no fire. There are sounds of animals surrounding her, the howls warning beacons to stay away. They are pulled into a tight huddle; a group of penguins trying to observe heat.

No one lies down, or tries to get comfortable. It’d be pointless to even attempt it.

As Bellamy crashes against her the second they find a spot more sheltered by bushy trees, she doesn’t really have a choice but to lean against him, a little harder than she’d like to admit.

When she does, he breathes a contented sigh like he’s been waiting for this all day.

She hasn’t realized how much she needs him, his desperate heartbeat, his excitable fingers twirling through her hair.

Crashing against him now, Clarke has no idea why she’s been pushing him away today.

His arms come up around her and Bellamy pulls her into his lap like she’s a teddy bear, hugging her close and kissing at her head as a reminder that she’s still here.

“You’re starting to scare me Clarke,” is all he whispers when he tucks his face underneath her grimy curls, soaked in sweat that doesn’t belong there in mid-January.

His body heat is doing no favors for the patches of her skin that feel like they’re melting, but she still welcomes him and twists into him weakly.

“If you need space… I’ll understand that,”

“I don’t want you to worry,” she says to him. If he starts to panic then she’s going to panic too.

“Did you not see yourself last night?”

“This isn’t a normal infection. It’s too quick I just don’t… I haven’t seen it like this before,”

She wraps one arm over his shoulder but keeps her injured one close to her heart, between the two of them.

“This might not be something that I can fight,”

She’s doing okay for now. She’s plodding along, a little like a kicked puppy with no way of defending herself and no self-reliance, but at least she’s still going. None of them know how long she’s going to be able to keep this up for.

“Let me help you?”

His voice cracks.

“Bellamy you were walking all night. You haven’t slept in days and you were carrying me for the better part of the morning,” Clarke flashes back, forcing whatever stable-mindedness she has into taking in the shadows under his eyes. “You need to sleep or else you’ll-”

“Clarke, don’t even try to do this,” he warns her, leaving no room for argument.

His arm lifts her a little higher in his lap, moving her so that she can rest her head on to his shoulder.

She has to stop for a coughing fit midway through the manoeuvre, and he lets her choke it into his fleece.

“Bell?” she asks when she gets her voice back, swollen throat barely letting the air through.

His hand starts to trail patterns into her back, smoothing past her clothes to bare skin. He keeps one hand on her face, constantly monitoring her rising temperature as though that might have any sort of effect.

“I think I’m scared too,”

He turns his cheek down to her, awkwardly because she is already pressed into his neck.

“Go to sleep, Clarke,” is all he says, and she sighs, breath hot and wet with phlegm.

“That’s not going to help anything,”

“I know,” he agrees, voice dead-panned. “But I don’t know what else to do,”

 

...

 

She wakes up a couple hours later and the rain is really setting in. She doesn’t feel wet though, and realizes that’s because there is something heavy and warm leaning over her, sheltering the top half of her body completely.

The droplets of rain falling from his soaked curls land on to her forehead with conviction, unrelenting, and it’s a mild soother. An attempt to quench the fires blazing through her bloodstream that will ultimately be defeated.

“Her pulse, O,” he says and Clarke shrivels into him some more to tell him she’s awake. “Clarke,”

“It’s okay, Bell. We’re gonna get her there,”

“Go to sleep,” Clarke moans and grasps at his neck to bring him closer some more.

“Listen to her fucking heart,”

A light hand rests to her chest and presses in a little too much. Her face must show that because the hand darts away just as quickly as it touched her. She turns even further into Bellamy, too sensitive and too alert of her own heartbeat.

“Why is this all happening so fast?” he sounds so raw, so helpless. “Doesn’t this usually happen over weeks?”

“The color of her face,”

Octavia’s voice is cautious, knowing.

“It’s like looking at a ghost,”

“You think I don’t know that?” her brother snaps and wraps his arms tighter around Clarke protectively. He rocks her into him, cooing between each time he speaks. “Wake Murphy up,”

“Why?”

“He helps her,” a pause and a bob of his throat that rubs against Clarke’s forehead. “More than I can,”

“Bellamy,” she feels herself whimper. “I think I’m going to throw up,”

He moves on reflex, lurching her to the side and pulling the hair back from her face as she crawls away from the group pathetically. When she puts pressure on the palm of her hand, she hears more than feels the pain that ripples through her.

Her vomit is almost pure water and leaves her feeling winded and just that bit more pathetic.

“Okay, Clarke,” he whispers lowly, plaiting her hair away from her mouth hastily so that his hands can become occupied with rubbing smoothly, comforting at her back. “It’s okay,”

When she finishes gagging, that dry and fruitless heave that takes all the air from her lungs, she can do nothing but crash her head into the ground in agony, still leaning all of her weight into her infected hand.

She doesn’t even care if she has face planted the insides of her stomach, there’s just so much that’s been taken out of her.

“Come on Clarke,” he mumbles and tries to pull at her shoulders. “Come back,”

Rubbing her head into the soaking wet grass, drops thudding all around her and chilling her to the bone, she can’t bring herself to move away.

“Clarke?” Octavia asks, sounding a lot more uncertain than her brother.

“I’m just, I’m just gonna sleep here,”

“Wake Murphy up,”

Clarke feels her breath start to come out a little sharper when she tries to settle down into the ground, a little more urgent.

“I’m not sleeping,” erupts from somewhere, sounding impatient and lacking in the snark that Clarke has come to associate with the voice.

“I don’t know what to do,”

“And you think I do?”

“Well she hung around with you all fucking day. You’d think you would have picked up a thing or two,”

“Bellamy calm down. Losing your shit isn’t going to help her,”

“Let’s all just…” Clarke tries to find the words as she mewls into the grass. “Let’s all get some sleep. It’s f-f-freezing hot,”

That makes sense, she thinks it does.

“Hey Griffin, you’re gonna have to sit up,” a hand lands on her shoulder, one that she knows doesn’t have a partner.

“I don’t want to,”

“I know,”

Something in his voice sounds hopeful though, and Clarke feels herself drift towards it.

Once she’s shifted upright, her head rolls around uncontrollably and thumps heavily against someone’s shoulder.

“Jesus Christ,” Murphy breathes when he catches sight of her face.

Bellamy’s shoulder flinches under her weight.

“Yeah,” Clarke gestures, waving her minced palm vaguely around her face as she takes on what she thinks might be a smirk. “I tend to have that affect,”

“Definitely not the time to be smart, Clarke,”

“Can’t just turn it off,” she shrugs and noses into Bellamy’s jacket, not caring if she’s wiping her own sick into him.

There’s some rustling around her, some hushed whispers, and then Raven is somewhere.

Clarke clutches on to Bellamy’s sleeve but tries to smile sweetly to Raven. She gave Clarke a wide berth today, more focused on covering as much ground as possible.

“Okay, Clarke you’re gonna have to give us a hand, help us out a little,” Raven’s voice is steady, only lilting at the corners. “What do you need?”

She hates this. She hates how pathetically she’s masking all of this pain, hates how hard she’s having to try to be okay. If this is blood poisoning, then she’s got days at the most. What she hates even more is how lost they all sound.

Her eyes flash open, crooning around to take everything in. Her vision is muted, but she can see everything she needs to see.

If she thought the huddle couldn’t get any tighter than it already had been, she was wrong.

“I need some water,” she says, hoping the conviction in her voice is good enough. She needs to take some responsibility, look after herself as best she can.

Something cold and metallic touches her lips and floods her mouth desperately, washing over her chin and cleaning her down.

“This isn’t something we can fix,” she admits once she isn’t being drowned anymore.

The rain patters on around her, soaking her to the core now that she’s more on top of Bellamy than he on her.

It’s a reality check, but they all need one. They need to stop beating themselves up for not being able to get her better, and she needs to let the actuality of her situation sink in for herself.

“We can’t expect to let something like this take its course and roll away. It’s not like that,”

“But you’re in pain, Clarke,” Murphy argues, face twisting.

“I can handle a little pain,” she promises.

Really, it isn’t the pain that is taking everything out of her. It’s the shivers, the chill, the fever tearing up in patches across her whole body and leaving behind it scarlet stains and blisters.

“Really, I can,”

“Just a few more days, Clarke. You hold on for a few more days, and we’ll get you there,”

“I can do that,” she nods, composing herself as best she can. Even if they get there, by that time it might not be enough. If the infection really has gotten into her bloodstream there’s only a matter of time before the sepsis kicks in.

“Please don’t give me anything else to eat,” she mutters when no one says anything, and she lets her eyes flutter back to closed, relenting to the weight of them again. “I’m tired of throwing up,”

“What do we do about your heart?” Bellamy pleads, not trying nearly as hard as the others to sound like he is thinking rationally.

“Have it,”

He’s probably referring to her racing pulse. Clarke would rather just leave it with that offer, knowing he won’t be able to help with the thudding heartbeat: it doesn’t work like that.

Clarke doesn’t really get back to sleep at all that night. The rain is too loud, or the wind is too harsh, or the throb of her hand is too violent. Not having enough energy to properly wake up though, she decides instead to just rest her head back to Bellamy’s chest and listen out for his steady and slow pulse, thinking that maybe if she learns it enough, she might be able to mimic it.

He and his sister have another conversation a while later, having not been able to finish their earlier one thanks to Clarke’s unruly nausea.

She doesn’t really remember the words that are said, or even actually understand them. The only way she’d be able to describe what she hears is as a string of words that sound like they belong together.

“She’s a fucking warrior. The day we hear Clarke Griffin give up really will be the end of the world,”

Something touches to her cheek and Clarke lazily shifts to kiss at it, hoping it’s what she thinks it is: the back of Bellamy’s warm hand.

“Yeah. She is,”

“Should have known… you wouldn’t have chosen anyone less,”

“I didn’t choose her,”

“You know what I mean,”

“No, I really don’t. This was never going to be a choice. You said it yourself, this was… inevitable,”

Clarke’s head hurts so much that she can’t even remember what that word means, let alone why he’s using it in a sentence. All she knows is that, having lived with them for months now, she is sure that Octavia is going to follow on with some quip about being pathetic for some reason.

Clarke is pretty sure she’s just imagining things when that isn’t what she goes for.

“I think this is why she held back for so long Bell. She knew you to well, knew you’d lose your shit when something like this happened and you were… well, if you were at the place you’re in right now,”

“I just can’t pretend,”

“Well you’re going to have to. You’re not allowed to be selfish, not with this Bellamy. She needs you to keep it together. You’re her rock,”

Her rock. Yeah. Yeah, he’s definitely her rock.

“But she’s mine,”

“You aren’t the one who’s dying Bell,”

Clarke might not understand all of this, but there is no way she missed that. Dying. Ouch.

…

She wakes up the next day in a similar manner to how she woke up yesterday, cradled by Bellamy’s blossoming arms.

“Go back to sleep, Clarke,” he tells her, not even looking down at her before he starts his grimace. “I’m not putting you down no matter what you say. You pushed yourself too much yesterday,”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to put me down,” she smiles weakly then wriggles in his arms, snuggling closer to him to wipe her brow against his fleece. “You’re too cozy,”

She thinks he smiles at that, hopes so anyway.

“My face has started to heal,” Clarke whispers when she reaches her hand up to scrub at her eyes. “At least that’s something,”

“Yeah, Clarke, at least that’s something,”

“I’m sorry for getting sick all over you,”

“It’s okay. You forget I practically raised O. I’ve sort of built up an immunity to all things gross like that,”

“Still… I didn’t want to be that much of a hot mess around you,”

“Princess, we’re past that. You’ve always been a hot mess around me,”

“I’m gonna take that as a complement, Blake. I don’t have the energy to do anything else,”

“Go back to sleep,”

“I’d rather stay with you,” she admits without shame.

He was right, her heart is beating unnaturally fast and it hasn’t ebbed once. She knows she’s weakening more and more by the second, falling further and further into a place between being here and… not.

“You know I’m going nowhere, right? Have I not proved that to you enough?” Bellamy asks, smiling sadly behind his words.

“I meant I’d rather be with you, like actually with you,”

Clarke knows she’s not making a lot of sense but it’s too hard to figure out the flow of an actual sentence.

“I don’t want to lose time,” she whispers and refuses to look at him as she does so. His heavy plodding stills, and she feels his fingers latch on to her body, grip tightening almost painfully to her highly-sensitised skin. Bellamy doesn’t carry on moving until he’s let out a cool breath into the air, patient and steady.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything you want to say,”

Honestly, she just wants to hear his voice for as long as she has left.

He waits for a while, brow furrowed like he’s confused. When he lets out a heavy sigh, Clarke rolls her eyes.

“I can’t think of anything,”

She knows the feeling.

“That’s okay, Bell,”

Now that everything feels like it needs to be rushed, neither of them can quite gather their bearings enough to get what they need to say out there.

“I’ve decided that when I get better I’m never going to put my bow back down. I feel kinda lost without it,”

He thinks, wondering if he should answer her honestly. He must decide to just go for it.

“Yeah you don’t look like you as much,” he admits, guiltily. “You weren’t kidding when you called it your life source, huh?”

Clarke hums and waits to reply, trying to count all of their days up.

“You remember that?”

Bellamy just shoots her a look. An ‘of course I remember that. How could I not?’ side-eye.

“Can you believe that was months ago?”

“It feels like yesterday,”

“Back when you were a petulant child,”

“And you were a stuck-up control freak,”

“Doomed from the start,” she says because, if she really is dying then she doesn’t really want to have to filter herself.

“Clarke,”

“Sorry,” she shrugs. She’s not.

“You gonna behave? Or am I gonna have to drop you on your ass a few times?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she smirks, raising her eyebrow.

When she feels herself go flying through the air, her fever disappears for just that millisecond. And her hand doesn’t feel so fucked as the wind tumbles through her ears at a rate that is definitely not normal.

She falls and for a moment, Clarke’s mind can’t help but drift to the thought that she’s going to hit the ground. As Bellamy’s arms land firmly back around her, clutching her to his chest tighter than ever, she instantly feels guilty for doubting him. Of course he’d catch her. He’d always catch her.

He returns to his march forward, a much more smug smirk gracing his face adorably.

Clarke takes the time to gather her strength and reaches her hand up to slap his chest harshly.

“You dick! You could have dropped me!” she scolds and refuses to let the smile overtake her face until she realizes that she should probably cherish each one of these now.

Bellamy scoffs and looks down at her.

“As if. You know I wouldn’t do that,”

“I’m not a football,” Clarke laughs, ignoring the shiver that runs down her spine: a reminder that fun isn’t going to be fun for much longer. Bellamy seems to sense it because his hand shifts to her head for a moment, to let her know that she can tuck it into the crook of his neck if she wants to.

Clarke takes the opportunity without hesitation, and hopes he doesn’t miss the way she pecks at the skin of his neck.

“You know, this isn’t what people mean when they tell you to sweep a girl off her feet?” she mumbles, unable to stop herself.

Her grin is burning into the side of his face. It doesn’t matter if the skin on her lips has dried out completely, or if her entire body is covered in uneven crimson patches.

His answering laugh comes in the form of a rumble, unnervingly seismic as ever.

“Well, when the girl in question is this tough to crack, then desperate times call for desperate measures,” he beams back.

“Spoken like a true heartthrob,”

“Don’t push it Griffin. Or this time I might not-so-accidentally forget to catch you,”

She laughs, head thrown back and cheeks sore. When he looks down at her, his smile has changed. He takes in her eyes and something about his expression becomes sort of… reverent. She’s on the brink of blood poisoning, and yet he’s managed to make her feel more alive than ever. She’s inching more and more towards death, and yet he is still looking at her like she’s something worth marveling.

Clarke’s laughing slows eventually, because the way he’s looking at her seems to bring something more than humor. Something deeper than that.

Something runs through her mind, solid boots drumming at it to remind her of the throb in her head. And as Bellamy breathes in sharply, about to say something to break the silence that has already become electrified, he gets jostled roughly and stumbles over his own feet in order to regain his balance.

Clarke’s arms going flying around him, one down his back and the other across his neck but it’s not like she’s going to be of much help. Luckily, he manages to find steady ground again after tripping, and he swears under his breath as he whirls around to see what it was.

Bellamy doesn’t forget that he’s still holding Clarke because he lifts his hand back to her head to hold her in as he spins, damping the head rush.

Raven brushes past them without so much as a grunt, whisking with her the unrelenting brown ponytail and a blank face that tells nothing.

Bellamy makes a sound, defensive and preparing for something that Clarke knows she doesn’t want to be a part of. He brings his arm across her thigh so that he can keep his hand to shelter her cheek.

“What the hell, Reyes?”

Bellamy’s growl makes both of them snap their heads to him, not that Clarke hadn’t already been watching him fondly, but now her expression melts to confusion, the goose bumps on her skin pricking up again as the wind gets stronger.

Raven doesn’t wither, she just whirls back to the two of them and focuses her determined glare on Bellamy.

“If you weren’t so busy fucking around and acting like a child, you might have seen me,”

Clarke leans her head back, snapping her gaze between the two of them and trying to ignore the itch in her throat when she asks:

“Am I missing something?”

She’s felt like she’s been missing something between the two of them ever since that night when she’d sensed something was off.

They both ignore her, with Bellamy’s hand coming to rest at the edge of her ear and hovering over her cheekbone as though he’ll be able to mask her from this.

“So I’m supposed to have eyes at the back of my head now too?” he snaps.

“No you’re supposed to be looking after her, not throwing her around like a rag doll,”

When Raven flicks her eyes over at Clarke, they melt just a little, scattering into tenderness for a moment.

“Hey,” Clarke says, scooting awkwardly in his arms to try to get between the two of them. “I am here. You don’t have to talk about me like I’m brain dead,”

“You should be asleep,” Raven pushes, but softer now that she’s talking to Clarke.

“I chose not to be,”

That seems to be enough because Raven turns on Bellamy again, gaze hardening.

“You may as well let her walk on her own. It’s not like you’re helping her get any rest by dropping her,”

Bellamy doesn’t say anything, but Clarke feels him lock his jaw against her teepeed forehead. She doesn’t want him to put her down. Selfishly, she needs this.

It’s not just because he was right in saying she pushed too hard yesterday, and keeping her off her feet does help with the physical strain just that bit. But she wants to stay connected to him for as long as possible, have as many treasurable moments as they can, make as many memories as they can.

The way that she grabs at the back of his neck must let him know all of this.

Bellamy turns his head softly, just enough to meet her eyes. The honey in his is raging a storm, clouded over in guilt. It’s not right. They were only having a laugh. There’s a question on the outline of his gorgeous irises, but she doesn’t know how to answer it until he voices it.

“Do you want me to put you down?” he whispers, quiet enough that it’s audible that he doesn’t want Raven to hear him ask it. He sounds younger than he has in ages.

Clarke knows she should look to Raven and clear up whatever it is that she’s missing, but she can’t tear her eyes away from his for a second.

She shakes her head, only enough of a movement for him to notice it. Raven wouldn’t see the small shift because of the angle they’re stood at and that doesn’t matter because this answer is only for Bellamy.

This is a confession that she needs him. She should feel bad about the responsibility she’s forcing upon him but knows that if he sets her down on to solid ground then she’ll probably just collapse to her knees.

When he takes her in, Bellamy doesn’t act like she’s just bestowed a huge weight on to his shoulders… literally.

He turns his face into hers some more, and he hides his answering smile in the boiling skin of her cheek. She feels the blush rise to fill in the patchy rashes and bloated cuts on her face as his shy grin grows the more he buries it into her. It’s sickeningly obnoxious, and Clarke is in love with it.

“I told you I want you to stay,” she whispers, not one hundred percent sure that she said it loud enough to even form words.

“And I told you I’m going nowhere,” he mumbles back. She doesn’t even mind when his bottom lip catches the dried edge of a cut at her cheekbone, and neither does he.

“I’m sorry I’m so gross,”

She feels the need to say it. They haven’t really had any physical boundaries for weeks, and the closer and closer they get, the more intimate this all feels. He isn’t making any sort of discomfort clear, but there is doubt festering in her mind about whether he’d actually want to be this close to her while she’s like this.

He’s about to reply when someone clears her throat from right next to them. Clarke’s head whirls around, and she worries about whiplash for a second.

“Clarke,” Raven’s voice breaks out, sounding disappointed. “Take a look at yourself. You’re as white as a sheet, your face is covered in rash and you’re sat there sweating while the rest of us are shivering. You need to look after yourself, not distract yourself,”

She sighs and tries to dab at her forehead self-consciously.

“I am looking after myself. I’m not even walking Rae,”

Clarke doesn’t want to argue, she really doesn’t. Not with the clock in her head constantly ticking its way down and especially not with her best friend.

Adjusting Clarke’s bow over her shoulder noticeably, Raven grumbles and scavenges for something else today. She settles for shooting Bellamy another humorless glare and steps in menacingly close.

The way Bellamy brings his hand back to shield Clarke’s body would be funny if there wasn’t so much hostility between the two of them. She hates it, can’t really think of anything that she can’t stand more.

“Touch a hair on her head, Blake, and you’re a dead man walking. You got that?”

Bellamy doesn’t wither but Clarke just wishes he would. Any opportunity she can take to get out of this would be welcomed wholeheartedly.

Raven seems content with that though, because she storms away over to Octavia and Murphy who have willingly taken the lead back.

The two of them stay there for a moment, hovering on tenterhooks because Clarke has no idea what that even was. She decides to ask him and opens her mouth to do so until he cuts her off, face set.

“You’re not,” Bellamy tells her as he turns around again, nose to nose.

Clarke stutters over hot air.

“I’m, I’m not what?”

“You’re not gross,” he says like nothing could be more obvious.

She levels him with a glare, calling bullshit immediately.

He rolls his eyes in return and drops his head to concede, working his way through his internal monologue to try and figure out what he is actually trying to say. Clarke watches him, learning him in ways she doesn’t need to, but she does anyway.

“Okay,” he relents, eyes squinting in apology before he continues. “Okay you’re a little gross. But I’ve already told you this: you’re beautiful. So, so beautiful. A little bit of infection does nothing to take any of that away. I don’t like seeing you like this one bit. You don’t get that it actually hurts every time you shiver just that bit more violently, or burn just that bit hotter. But that doesn’t make you any less stunning. You’re just a gross kind of stunning now,”

“Bellamy,” she whispers, overwhelmed with his honesty, with the intensity pouring from his eyes like figurative tears. She wants to tell him that he is the most gorgeous man she has ever laid eyes on, in every single way possible.

But she has a feeling he already knows that. He can surely hear it in the crack in her throat, in the way she swallows thickly before answering, in the way her voice breaks on his name because she can’t even think it without getting struck by the thunder of his heart.

“You know it’s more than just a little, right?” she asks him, repeating the words she used a forever ago because that’s all she can figure to be coherent right now.

“Yeah, Clarke. Yeah, I know,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Watch me stumble over and over,'  
> \- Lover of the light, Mumford and Sons


	17. Tore my shirt to stop you bleeding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really don't want to hurt you guys... so I'm sorry in advance

“So are you going to tell me why Raven keeps looking at you like she might actually be able to set you on fire?”

Clarke asks the question a lot later on in the day, fading in and out of consciousness for hours because it has started to become just too hard to stay awake.

She hasn’t thrown up today, which is probably because she hasn’t eaten anything. The lack of food likely isn’t doing anything for her immune system, but her throat doesn’t feel like it has been torn apart quite as much as it had last night.

She sleeps for longer than she’d have liked to but there isn’t enough energy in her body to do anything but sleep.

Octavia had fallen beside them a while ago, just hovering in Clarke’s periphery and it’s a welcome amusement. Never being one to make dark situations any darker, O provides them with some much needed light-heartedness. Clarke does try to pay attention but mostly just finds herself humming along with the siblings’ arguing.

She thinks she can see Murphy and Raven holding hands a way ahead, but she might just be imagining it, not one hundred percent clear on what is and isn’t reality right now.

When Octavia drifts away, as dreamlike as how she’d waltzed towards them, Clarke asks the question because she wants to hold on to the small surge of energy she’s got.

“She wanted to carry you this morning,” he answers and shuffles her around in his arms.

He’s made a few sounds throughout the day, disapproving of the way Clarke has persisted in her pursuit of his neck. She’d be content being carried all bridal style if he weren’t made to fit just right to her, right there at the point where his neck meets his collar.

Clarke rubs her forehead against his shoulder.

“I don’t remember…”

“We set off as soon as the sun rose so you were still asleep. You were having a nightmare I think,”

She doesn’t remember that either.

“You kind of said my name in your sleep. Raven didn’t think it’d be a good idea for me to be with you,”

“Why not?”

Clarke is glad that she doesn’t know what she dreamt about, hating the idea that she had to see him in pain even if it wasn’t real.

“She’s not exactly my biggest fan is she?” he says, matter-of-factly. He doesn’t sound like he cares that much but Clarke knows him better than that. “Let’s just hope Wells likes me,”

“Why’s that?” she asks, blushing a little because he is still talking about the future like they might have one.

“Well we don’t want your entire family to hate me,” he shrugs back like it’s obvious.

“You can tell him that I approved. That’ll be enough for him,”

“You can tell him that yourself. Plus, I very much doubt that. There’s no way someone could be friends with you and not need to scrutinize your… person to the third degree,”

“My person, huh?”

He drops his head, grinning.

“Yeah, Princess. Your person,”

“Wells isn’t like that,” she smiles, shaking her head thoughtfully. It hasn’t really sunk in that she probably won’t see him again, ever. “He’s not aggressively protective like Raven is,”

Like you are, she thinks.

“And Murphy likes you,” Clarke adds on.

“What’s Murphy got to do with anything?”

He’s family too now. Of course he’s family.

There is a shout from further ahead, sounding hopeful and content so Clarke tries to whip her head around. The liquid fire trickles up her neck to form a crook, and she tries not to wince too hard as she cranes to see Octavia.

“We hit the city!”

“Vancouver?” she croaks, and instantly regrets it.

“I don’t know, but the border of the park is just up there! I think we can just follow the highway now,”

Bellamy lifts her up a little more, smile clear in his voice.

“Not long now, Princess. I told you we’d get you there,”

Clarke wants to smile too but she knows that there is surely at least a couple of days still to come. The rash on her wrist, climbing sullenly towards her heart, doesn’t look like it’s going to take more than a day or two to really kick in.

Bellamy is still hopeful, still refusing to admit that she’s dying. But they must all know that by now; know that this is unfixable unless they can get some actually sterile conditions.

“Yeah Bell, not long now,”

He knows that she’s not referring to getting to where they need to be. Hope doesn’t seem to be sticking around anymore.

They don’t even try to jump across the hoods of the cars cluttering the highway, with Bellamy refusing to risk a fall with her in his arms. They walk in single file along the barricade of the highway, with Octavia in front and the other two bringing up the back.

Clarke wishes she could feel safe, surrounded by her family, but the day just drags on and on and she doesn’t get any more present.

When they encounter their first walker since the cabin, Clarke knows that she’s in trouble.

They handle it: just a fire of a gun from somewhere and silence surrounds them again, but her breath leaves her the instant that Bellamy grips her tighter to brace himself. Her numbed fingers itch for her bow, and Clarke reaches behind her back upon instinct to grab at an arrow before she realizes that she hasn’t got any weapons on her.

He’s got her, and yet that survival reflex blanches all of that out. And in that second, all she sees is the walker stumbling clumsily towards them and she has nothing: not even the ability to stand steady on her own feet.

“I’ve got you,” Bellamy whispers at her ear like she needs reminding, because he catches on to the oncoming hyperventilation, the oncoming panic, the second her racing heart starts to pick up even more. “We’ve all got you.”

But that isn’t the problem. She hasn’t got herself anymore.

Raven extends an olive branch a little later into the day, and it does help Clarke in some ways.

Her and Bellamy don’t say a word directly to each other, but when Clarke and Raven talk meagerly, he chips in now and then. Only to things she says, and only speaking to her. It’s not unhostile, not clear of tension, but they’re both trying as best they can to ignore whatever is going on between them.

She falls asleep midway through the conversation and she doesn’t wake up again until the sun has gone, and she’s perched, spread across what feels like the back of a bus.

She rubs at her eyes but makes no move to open them.

There is a chill forever in the air and she really is enclosed in the silence. Too silent for anyone to be around her. Upon the realization that she is alone, Clarke jerks her head and yanks herself upright as though pulled by strings. A wilting puppet hanging by its last thread.

She weaves her eyes around what she can confirm is a school bus, emptied and lined with vacated rosied chairs. Bellamy, she thinks. He’s not here. None of them are.

She pulls the three layers that smell so much like him around her tightly, glancing down to zip up the jacket when her eyes catch on her right hand. The exposed skin of it has faded completely, washed out to a lifeless grey and the veins leading up to her palm aren’t blue anymore. They’re shriveled while bulging at the same time, a bright purple that will never be natural.

She peels back the layers of Bellamy’s shredded shirt to reveal the cut, no longer trickling scarlet down her hand or gloopy yellow pus, but brown that reeks of staleness and decay. A maroon that carries no life in it whatsoever.

If she were to look into her own eyes, Clarke doesn’t have to guess at what she’d see. Milky thick cataracts that lock away any sort of trail to her soul.

There’s still a consciousness within her, she’s still self-aware, but each second that ticks on sucks that part of her further and further away into the back of her head.

This feels like she’s watching a horror movie from the corner of a screen, not through the eyes of the victim as it should be.

“Bell?” she calls but the word that leaves her mouth doesn’t sound like English whatsoever. It is more of a howl, or a caw. It’s not human.

There is a knock, once, twice, three times that echoes through the bus, the bus so fragile that the sound makes the whole thing shake.

Clarke looks to it hopefully, desperately and then the door opens as though pulled by the wind. She catches sight of the tangled curls, the bare arms that never feel the cold, the broad shoulders that can carry the weight of the world.

She relaxes instantly, a distorted sigh escaping her lips before she knows what she’s doing, and he keeps his head down as he walks down the aisle.

When he trips for the first time, Clarke doesn’t notice it. When he stumbles for the second time, she feels her head croon, too much thanks to the lack of control she’s got over her own muscle now.

What she thought was Bellamy lifts its head, and what little, unnecessary oxygen she’d been keeping in her lungs runs away.

He looks angry, he looks raging. He looks dead. And he is dead. Mobile and seemingly breathing but completely and utterly dead with blackened teeth hanging from his snarl and lips thinned to translucence.

Clarke rises to her feet, reaches around to her side and comes up empty because her arrows have been taken away. He meets her eyes and opens his mouth wide, accelerating towards her violently.

And seeing that look in his face, the way it holds nothing of the man she’s in love with, Clarke feels herself mewl, the sound coming out harsh and emotionless in the tone of a forever unfeeling zombie.

The cold plate of the floor is against her head before she knows it, her hand gushing out when the dead weight lands on to it. She cries out and kicks her feet because now, that’s all she has to fight with.

She doesn’t want to fight against him, no matter how unlike her Bellamy this might be. And yet she does because it’s all she knows. Her leg flies out uncontrollably and knocks against something hard and fabricated.

Her other foot kicks to make impact against a bone that feels inhumanely soft, even mushy against the force.

It’s not enough. Not ever enough. A hand comes to weave its way through her hair, gripping tightly. Another falls to her neck. Clarke arches up into it, just to speed this up. Let him have her. Walkers bite and Clarke would so much rather he bite her than anyone else, anything else.

When her head follows with the movement, Clarke falls slack. She doesn’t want to get her face eaten. She’d seen a body like it in Nebraska, too torn apart to turn, and she doesn’t want to go out like that. She’d like to keep her mouth as hers, not a snack or a meal.

“Princess,”

It’s a whisper that whirls around the entirety of her head. It’s a dream and Clarke clings to the word like a raft in this storm. It comes from the voice of her person, after all.

“Princess,”

It echoes around and ricochets what little of herself she had left in her mind straight to the forefront of her vision. It makes her open her eyes, even though they had already been stricken alert and awake.

The cloud of whatever that was drifts synthetically, just like the milky sheen of his eyes.

It’s too dark to see if it is actually her Bell, but he doesn’t look like he wants to eat her anymore.

The smell of death is dissolved away, only to be replaced by the familiar waft of smoke that he has always managed to carry with him. Scents of firewood, of last night’s drunken cigarette, of matches waiting to be struck.

When Clarke breathes in, only now realizing that she’s been holding her breath, it sounds wet and choked. It draws from her another attempt. And then when she still doesn’t feel like there is anything but a vacuum in her lungs, Clarke starts to drown.

The arm fisted at her back tries to ground her, melding together a mixture of fleeces and her own, thinning skin in a vice. It’s pain he probably doesn’t know he’s giving her. If his desperate fingers don’t form bruises at her back, then Clarke will be surprised.

Something heavy crashes against her forehead, a hammer to a nail like all those nights ago. She wonders if he can still read her mind. She hopes he can’t; she wouldn’t want him to know the way she is hopeless surrendering to whatever is happening to her.

The weight knocks against Clarke’s head again, while she hyperventilates unbearably. Their heads collide again for the third time, like he might be able to convince her heart to stop sprinting with the slowed pulse of his head pounding into hers.

Something wet and desperate touches to the side of her face, the edge of his lips just missing the corner of her mouth. Clarke tries to breathe in again, but nothing comes.

There’s a shout. Wait, no, not a shout at all because that’s not enough for the sound that smothers her cheek. There is a cry, a beg for help, a plead into one of her surface cuts.

The hand clutching to the back of her head scratches deep into her scalp, digging out burial grounds amongst her hair.

She wants to comfort him, desperately. But she’s only got one hand that isn’t frozen and writhing in pain, and the fire in her lungs won’t let any words escape.

‘It’s okay, Bell,’ she tries to say. ‘You can let me go,’

She can’t do it though, because there’s nothing left inside her.

When the feeling of actually having a head starts to seep away, taking with it all of its weight, Clarke feels herself fall slack into his arms. There’s a soft glow somewhere in her vision, gets stronger the tighter he pulls her into his chest, she cranes to it and follows its trail, feeling for the first time, completely and truly numb.

“Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay,”

He’s saying the words so fast that he’s barely getting them out, turning each one into a pleading hiss. He’s rocking her from side to side. There are feet and long legs all around her but Clarke clings to the way he’s singing out the lyric like it’s a hymn.

“Stay, stay, stay, stay,”

The shaky wet kisses he is pressing to the top of her head in between each prayer keep her centered to the bus, to the floor slipping with her own blood.

“Stay, stay, stay,”

The blood at the tips of her fingers starts to surge inwards, crawling toward her heart in an attempt to keep it going.

“Stay,”

So she will. She’ll stay for as long as she possibly can. She’ll stay if that is what is needed of her.

The first gulp of air that Clarke actually manages to swallow is deep and long and the sound she hears herself make would ring something like relief if it didn’t hurt so much.

She doesn’t wait to breathe again, knowing now how painful it is not to be able to say his name. She won’t miss up on the chance to do it at least once more.

“Bell,” she cracks out and his whole body stills. “Bellamy,”

His name doesn’t sound like his name anymore. It sounds like a promise.

His head slumps forward, and it’s like he can’t control where it ends up, falling slack into her chest, fingers tightening evermore into her scalp.

Bellamy breathes out unsteadily and Clarke can’t open her eyes. It wouldn’t matter if she did anyway, it’d be too dark.

“Stay,” he says again after an eternity of him craning for her heart. “Stay.”

Hands tighten at her shoulder that feel too small to be his and she startles again, knowing that if she’s not being held by him then she doesn’t want to be held at all.

The revitalized panic seems to kick Bellamy into action, cradling her against him once more and smashing her face into the side of his to keep her sheltered.

“Don’t touch her, please, don’t touch her.”

It’s not like when they came out of the cabin, when he snapped at Raven more harshly than he’s ever spoken. The way he says this couldn’t be more different. This is him asking for the biggest favor he could possibly ask for, sounding humbled and craving and gracious in a way that pleads somberly.

This is him imploring his friends to give him this, letting them know that if they can’t then he won’t hold it against them.

“Please,”

The hands melt away and his lips press further into her skin, the skin that Clarke can’t really feel.

“Please,”

“I’m dying Bell,” she thinks she whispers but it is probably too hoarse to actually make a sound.

“Please,” he chokes out, not an ounce of the usual last defenses left standing. “Stay,”

 

…

 

“Clarke?” his voice rings low about an hour later, sounding hoarse after screaming so vividly before. There’s a guard back up. There’s a rigidity to the way he says her name. Good, she thinks. Now she can keep pretending that her heart isn’t breaking. “You can keep sleeping but we’re gonna make a move now,”

She nods her head, mouth feeling like it’s been too burned for words.

“I’ve got you,”

How many times has he told her that? He’s said it more times than he should have to say something like this. Clarke should know that she’s not alone.

When Clarke feels the cold night air scrape at her cheek again, she knows she’s being rocked in his arms, snuggles into his chest for the warmth she’s instantly missing.

“You takin’ me to Neverland, Peter?” she mumbles, muffled into his shirt.

He doesn’t say anything.

Clarke wiggles her toes, just to test out whether or not she’s flying.

“Princess I don’t think I have it in me to be funny right now,” Bellamy sighs tiredly. “Not tonight,”

“I’m sorry,”

He doesn’t tell her that she has nothing to be sorry about, because that would be a lie. She’s hurting him and he isn’t going to pretend that she’s not.

“You need something?” he asks after a few hurried paces, concern impossible to keep out of his expression. “Some food, water, you know, anything at all?”

“Can you keep talking to me? I don’t care what we talk about I just need to hear your voice,”

“Is there anything left to say?”

How could he ask that? There’s so, so much left to say. More than she’ll ever be able to say in her numbered days. He sounds more defeated than Clarke can stomach, so she settles for the insidious silence and hopes to God that when she dies, he won’t break.

 

…

 

Nobody looks her in the eye for the rest of the night. They just… walk, and they don’t stop for anything. There is silence for longer than Clarke can remember there ever having been, and it feels so heavy.

It feels like they’re losing time that they can’t afford and yet she hasn’t got the energy to think of anything that might convince them to talk to her.

The hallucination must have all thrown them properly, more than her flu-like symptoms and more than the state of her hand. This is something else completely: an end of the line kind of warning sign.

Murphy hasn’t spoken to her all day and Clarke won’t admit out loud that she misses him. Bellamy was right the other night; he does help her more than she can explain. Maybe it’s because he knows what it feels like to have half of your only defenses taken out of action, maybe it’s because he knows what it is like to lose someone you’re in love with (because losing Bellamy is something she will never be able to handle).

Maybe it’s because their silent communications have always been something that no one else will ever be able to decode. Maybe it’s because she knows that, after she dies, he is the reason that Raven won’t be alone.

Either way she misses him.

And she misses Raven. Misses her easily determined diplomacy; misses the way they hold each other’s hands during trips down memory lane.

Misses how Clarke’s figurehead of trust has started to drift away quicker than her breath has.

And she misses Octavia too. For reasons that are too evident to think about. She misses Octavia the same way you miss the sun in mid-January, the same way you already miss your favorite cousin after meeting up during the only major special occasion that warrants seeing your extended family.

If this is how they want to spend their last couple of days with her, then she’ll let them have that. Just like funerals are never actually for the dead, she wants to devote this to the living, knowing that after her death they will never be given the time to grieve properly. Not in this world.

“Murph, come here,” Raven calls a lot further into the night.

Clarke has taken to watching the stars, remembering where the corona borealis is so that when she can’t open her eyes anymore, she’ll still know where to pray to.

“Found somethin’?”

Clarke doesn’t care what they’re looking at, doesn’t want to know what they start whispering about hurriedly. It’s not like her knowing will help anything.

Bellamy should take the time to give his arms some rest, but he doesn’t set her down on the roof of the car that O is leaning against, like she expects him to.

When he stops to wait for them, next to his sister, Clarke feels him press his lips to her hairline and he keeps them there, just because, letting her head roll higher on to his shoulder rather than at the crook in his elbow.

She sighs back and ignores the pressure behind her eyes.

“You have no idea how much I wanted to kiss you,” she recalls, thinking back to the night on the bridge, the night where all of this became detrimental. This is breaking her heart; how close to something they had been. Something real and tangible.

“Baby sister present,” Octavia clears her throat but sounds like she’s reluctant to interrupt. “Just in case you didn’t know,”

“Sorry, O,” Clarke whispers back, blinking slowly. “Couldn’t help it,”

Bellamy leans his head on to hers, forming her favorite pyramid and she watches as his eyes drift closed. He is breathing heavily, like he’s willing something to happen in their favor for once.

“Yeah Princess,” he murmurs, that low and gentle thrum that makes her shiver. “I do,”

“We’ll talk later,” she decides. “I’ve got something I need to say,”

Not in front of Octavia. Her goodbye for him needs to be just that: for him.

“O, come here,” Murphy shouts over.

When the girl scampers away, Bellamy makes a disapproving grunt and opens his eyes to roll them at Clarke.

“They’re treating us like kids,” he sulks.

“I think they’re just trying to make all of this easier,”

“You aren’t getting it, Clarke,”

“What?” she asks, taking in the way his eyebrows have pulled together soberly.

“This is never going to get any easier,”

“Bell, I had to watch my dad die. Of course I understand,”

His face drops as the memory floods back to him. He even has the gall to look ashamed of himself, but Clarke is quick to snatch that away.

“I’m just saying,” she whispers and moves her hand up to cup his cheek, pressing his face closer to hers.

His head shakes softly against hers.

“I know that that was impossible for you. Really, I understand how hurt you were, but this is different,”

“It isn’t,”

He’s still shaking his head against her own, determined, but he doesn’t say anything. Neither of them are going to agree on this, and neither of them are prepared to fall out tonight.

“You want to go and find out what they’re plotting?” Clarke asks, nodding over to the other three blindly.

“Nah I don’t really care,”

“You might when you know what it is?”

“No,” he pushes his face further into hers, breathing the same air that she is.

Is this what they could have had? The kind of love that always keeps them hungry, to the point of not being satisfied until they are literally breathing the other one in. The kind that makes any other taste feel like nothing in comparison to the space between their lips. Always humming with the potential of more, and the contentedness of not _needing_ more at the same time.

Whatever it is that they’ve found, it seems to bring the group a new sense of life and even puts them in good enough moods that Raven offers they make camp for a few hours, saying taking that time out won’t be that big a difference.

Bellamy isn’t quite on the same page because he argues with all three of them- for longer than Clarke can stay awake- about how they need to keep moving. How they need to get to Vancouver, how they need to get her to safety.

It takes Raven yanking Clarke out of his hands, cradling her awkwardly when her boots crash to the ground, and Murphy drags Bellamy out of earshot.

It’s the first time Bellamy has been out of reach of Clarke since her hallucination, and they must be wearing matching expressions of discomfort at the loss of touch. They stand over there talking for at least ten minutes, which drags out as Clarke drops her head on to her friend’s shoulder.

Raven holds her like this isn’t the first time that they’ve been close since their conversation in the creek. Just as fondly as ever and brushing back any of the lingering tension that she has with Bellamy in favor of keeping Clarke’s complacent neck comfortable.

The discussion between Murphy and Bellamy looks heated if anything, both men looking equally as stubborn in their resolves, both finding as many arguments to counter as each other.

It flips on its head when Murphy reaches his arm out to Bellamy and rests it awkwardly on to his shoulder. Clarke doesn’t think she’s ever seen a more uncomfortable encounter, and yet Bellamy’s expression shifts completely, and he starts to nod along, conceding.

What are they saying? What did Murphy manage to think of to convince Bellamy to get some much needed rest? Whatever it was, she’s grateful. If he manages to get even a few moments of sleep then it’ll do him a world of good.

They trudge back over, and no one says anything when Bellamy strides towards Clarke and takes her back into his arms as though pulled by magnets. She falls into him clumsily, stumbling into his warmth and knowing that even ten minutes without him took away all of the numbing he’d brought her. Her hand had begun to swell just that bit more, her fever had started to climb even higher.

And now, as he wraps his arms around her back in a shameless embrace, all of the synthetic anesthetic seeps back in to her bloodstream.

“Missed you,” she hums into his ear when she just can’t help herself, grinning shyly as she pictures how pathetic they must look.

“Yeah, you too,” he admits and noses at her jaw, seemingly undeterred.

They make camp between two cars, huddled around their own feet, and Bellamy doesn’t hesitate to pull Clarke on top of his lap.

“Clarke you should really try to eat something now,” Octavia tells her, reaching forward with a can that Clarke can’t even look at without feeling queasy.

“I don’t want to,” she answers, scrunching her nose up.

She spins around a little and presses her back into Bellamy’s chest so that she can face everyone. Clarke doesn’t know why the air seems to have lightened just that little bit, but even if Vancouver is just a couple of miles away, she knows she’s not going to make it. She’s been pushed past the point of no return already.

No, she just needs to say what she’s been planning ever since she realized that this was a done deal. Once she’s gotten this off her chest, she’ll be able to let go.

“I want to say something,” Clarke starts, fidgeting with the bandage around her flaming palm. “I know… I know we might not be ready to admit it, but I’ve got to say this before something like tonight happens again and I don’t get the chance,”

She doesn’t see Octavia open her mouth, but she hears the sound that erupts from Bellamy’s throat and feels him squirm beneath her.

“Clarke-”

“No, O, I need this,” she snaps, cutting the words off and moving to carry on until she feels Bellamy let out a sharp hiss from behind her and he wriggles out from under her hastily. Clarke topples over on to the cold concrete and barely registers his scampered movements.

Before she knows it, Bellamy is stood above them all and he’s scratching at his neck, hand hanging from it awkwardly. He’s avoiding her eyes, swinging his gaze around the highway to look anywhere but at their huddle.

It takes him a while to get the words out. They just sit there watching, Clarke’s mouth hanging wide as she takes him in.

“I can’t do this,” he breathes out heavily, voice sounding wrecked, and he turns on his heels, storming away from the group out into the next gap a few cars down. He doesn’t forget to take his gun with him, but he might as well be sprinting away with the pace at which he leaves.

Clarke watches him go, stunned. He needs to hear this. Everyone else must be looking at him too, silence enrapturing the pathetic camp they’ve made.

“Should I, should I go after him?” Octavia asks quietly, hesitant and uncertain. Clarke can’t tear her eyes away from Bellamy, how he’s leaning rigidly against the bonnet of a pick-up truck, one that looks nothing like their one.

He’s looking away from all of them, so the only thing that can give her any sort of read on him is the stoic set of his shoulders.

“No, give him some space,” Murphy says, sounding set.

Now Clarke really wants to know what they spoke about.

“He walked away for a reason,”

She breathes in, choked and wet, and Raven shuffles into her side a little more, letting her know that if she can’t hold herself up for long then she’ll be there to catch her. Raven raises a hand to Clarke’s face, testing the ever-climbing fever, and the droop in her eyes tells her there is no sign of release.

Yeah, Clarke needs to say this now.

“Guys just let me say this and then I’ll shut up,”

“If you’re going to try to say goodbye, Clarke, then we don’t want to hear it,”

“Okay,” she thinks. “Okay, I won’t say goodbye. I just want you all to know that… well, we’ve spent so long trying to hold on to our humanity, trying to cling to ourselves and not become shells… I just don’t think you’ve realized how good you are without any of that. We tried so hard to not turn into something else, and we missed how we’ve already become different people. And that isn’t the horrible blasphemous thing that we all thought it would be. If-” _when_ “I don’t get to the end of the line with you, I just want you to remember that.”

Nobody says anything, and she can’t picture their expressions because she’s too caught up in playing with her bandages, watching as the blood changes color at each layer.

“We knew that the chances of all of us making it would be slim, yeah? We were prepared for something like this to happen. I don’t want you to tear yourselves up over something that was inevitable-”

“Inevitable,” Octavia echoes, barely more than a breath like she’s saying it to herself, like she’s trying to recall a memory. Her eyes flick over to her brother but Clarke can’t follow along.

“When you get to Vancouver, all I want is for you to be you. As you are now, because you should be proud of who you lot are now.”

“So should you, Clarke,” O answers her, knocking her foot into Clarke’s boot to enforce her point. “And we’ll always follow you,”

Follow doesn’t sound like the right word. It makes her sound like a leader, like she is something that they can rely on. She’s not that anymore, even if she might have been before.

“You’re the head,” Raven agrees, her own voice sounding weaker than normal, quieter and more tepid than Raven can ever be expected to be. “You think for all of us, so we don’t have to,”

It might not have made sense all the way, but Clarke can understand what she means.

“You don’t need me for that,” she whispers, locking eyes with Murphy because he’s the only one who’s face isn’t betraying him.

No one argues. This is her goodbye to them, and they all know it. Even if they have convinced themselves that they do need her, when she dies they’ll soon realize that they were wrong.

It’s not like she didn’t know that she was the brain of their team. In a way, they’d all sort of become some important part of the human anatomy. With her being the logic, the head, and Octavia being the smile, and Raven being the gut because that girl is all instinct. And Murphy being the heavy set shoulders of a body that has had to carry the weight of the world on his own.

And Bellamy, always Bellamy, being that undying heart. That unmoving and steady force that has kept all of them thriving.

“Can you do me a favor?” she asks, after a lifetime of companionable silence.

“Anything,” Raven answers.

“Can you tell Wells that I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to him. Tell him I died happy, and at peace. That I didn’t let myself become one of those things, and I died with my soul fully intact,”

“Clarke,” Murphy’s voice breaks a little and Raven makes a choked sound into her arm.

“Just do that for me, please?”

Clarke knows she should be dead by now. With the exposure to the wild conditions of winter, and the way the red spider in her arm is crawling steadily up it, she should be dead. And the only thing that is keeping her heart beating is her own drive, well, hers and her family’s.

“We’ll tell him that you didn’t stop fighting,” Octavia nods when the other two don’t agree. “But only if you hold on for a little longer, Clarke, just a couple more days.”

She doesn’t see how that is going to make any sort of difference. Her body is more gone than alive anymore. But if this is what it takes then she’ll keep that fight in her for some time more. A little longer.

“Raven,” Clarke asks after another moment of silence, preparing the checklist she’s got in her head to tick another thing off.

Raven doesn’t do anything other than breathe as her head rests on Clarke’s cold and sweaty shoulder.

“Whatever grudge you’re holding against Bellamy… I know it’s about me and if I die knowing that you two are on either side of this then… I don’t, I can’t,”

“Clarke, you don’t understand,”

“I know I don’t. But I don’t have the strength to understand anymore,”

When Murphy speaks, Clarke whips her head up, not having realized that this has affected all of them.

“Griffin you’ve got to be able to see where she’s coming from,” he mumbles, nodding sympathetically at Raven.

“Hey,” Octavia cuts in unexpectedly, and Clarke is suddenly left feeling like she’s started something between the whole group. “Bell hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“No, but he hasn’t exactly made things easier,”

Clarke gasps at the clear accusation, and the unapologetic way Murphy throws it out there like it might be able to carry with it any sort of validity. She wants to butt in, to defend him but she’s left with no words on her lips, helpless and gaping like a goldfish.

Raven stays silent too, busy with leaning on to Clarke, and letting Clarke lean on to her.

“That’s not fair,” O says harshly, confidently. “All he has done is cared,”

“Yes but that isn’t what she’s needed,” the man argues pointedly, nodding his head at Clarke.

“And how do you know what Clarke has needed, any more than my brother has?”

“I don’t. But I am not pretending like I do,”

“Look at him Murphy!” Octavia commands when he folds his arm across his chest decidedly. Clarke winces, because she can’t look at him, can’t even bear to see his broken silhouette. O’s tone is nothing but cold. “He’s in so much pain.”

Clarke squeezes her eyes shut. He’s in pain because of her. If she’d just held out for only a day more, then she’d never have given him hope, never would have admitted to her want of something lasting with him. He wouldn’t be as torn up as he so clearly is. And neither would she be, because even though every part of her body is agony right now, nothing is as painful as this.

“And Clarke isn’t?!”

She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen Murphy like this. Even when he was talking about Emori, he hadn’t shown this much emotion. And it’s not like the anger he is so evidently projecting is new, just the intensity of it.

“Guys,” Clarke tries to cut them off, stunned as to how this had even reached this level, but they both ignore her.

“I never said that! I just said you can’t blame Bellamy for caring about her,”

“No, I can blame him for not being able to keep it together like the rest of us have. For acting like he is hurting any more than the rest of us,”

That one throws Clarke for a loop. She doesn’t know if he is hurting any more than the three of them, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. Maybe they’re all hurting in their own ways.

Clarke knows though, that if this were the other way around, there’d be no doubt in her mind that she’d be grieving ten times harder for Bellamy than any of them. And that’s not to say that they wouldn’t be broken, it just wouldn’t be the same.

And now that this is being released into the icy night, Clarke is revealed to the massive fracture between them all. The Blakes versus Murphy and Raven. Neither one being more right. She doesn’t know how she hasn’t seen this yet, but this is the push she needs to keep breathing for just that bit more time, because she can’t leave them like this.

She can’t leave them with their last memories of her being sour, even if the anger isn’t directed to her.

“Guys,” Clarke starts again, but her voice is too hoarse and too splintered to make a dent in the fierce argument.

“You’re trying to say he’s not looking after her! You’re making him out to be selfish!” Octavia’s own voice is rampant, chaotic.

“He _is_ being selfish!”

“No he’s not,” Clarke tries to say, because she can’t think of a more selfless act than carrying someone across a whole state to keep them alive. And yet again, they act like she’s not there. Like she’s already gone.

“He couldn’t even stick around long enough for Clarke to say what she needed to say,” Murphy sneers, baring his teeth and looking just like the animal she thought he resembled the first night she saw him. His ‘fuck it’ attitude is clear as day; he’ll say what he needs to say now that this has been started and to damn with the consequences. “He couldn’t even stay and be with her when she gathered up the strength _yet again_ to do something we were all too weak to do. He couldn’t even do what she needed most, and hold her while she said goodbye-”

“That isn’t what this is,” Clarke tries, raising her voice desperately because she can feel her eyes start to build with the pressure behind them.

And when Murphy delivers his next blow, the air leaves her lungs just like it did last night, and she is left speechless and panting into the miles and miles between her and the rest of them.

“That _isn’t_ love,”

Love.

Love.

Love, echoes around her mind like he shouted it into a void. She hasn’t admitted to anyone yet, that that is what it is between the two of them, and she has known for days that she can’t do that. Not when the end of it is approaching so steadily.

He’s got it backwards, is all she can think once she’s banished the word from her head. He’s got it all backwards.

Hallucinated tumbleweed drifts across the cluttered plane above them, and Octavia’s icy words cut through each ball as it strolls aimlessly.

“How could you say that?”

She sounds breathless, she sounds hurt. She sounds like she can’t even recognize the man in front of her. Clarke hastens to blink the tears away from her own eyes, knowing that if she cries now then it’s only going to make things worse.

She has cried only twice since the infection. Once after that unspeakable first week, when she’d done things that she will forever regret, and once on the night that she told Bellamy about her father, the night she realized that she would have to beg him not to fall any harder.

She’ll save her tears for a time where she doesn’t have to pretend to be strong. To pretend to be the warrior that they all think she is.

“It isn’t the love that she deserves,” is all Murphy answers with, and there is nothing left to say.

He’s right. She doesn’t deserve Bellamy’s love. She doesn’t deserve it at all. She has done nothing whatsoever to earn it, to earn that magnificent heart. There Murphy goes again getting everything backwards: of course she doesn’t deserve him. He’ll always be twice the fighter, the protector, the lover that she can be.

Clearly, Murphy thinks the opposite.

How had this turned so bitter? This was meant to be Clarke confessing that she’s proud of all of them, that she’s confident in the fact that once she’s gone, they’ll all be able to look after each other. And now, looking at the cracks and the faults in a system that she had thought would work fluidly, all laid bare in front of her, Clarke feels herself melt.

This would all be so much easier if they could just blame her. Just be mad that she let herself get into this state, and then once she’d died, their anger might have floated away with her soul, and they would be left still as a team, to grieve together.

And now she knows that she’s just been acting as a buffer. Her own illness a distraction from the problems between the two pairs.

There is no way that Bellamy hasn’t heard all of that. Hell, every walker within a five mile radius has probably heard the argument. And she knows he’d never have walked away to a point that he wouldn’t be able to hear if they were in serious trouble.

What must he be thinking? Clarke can’t even look at him. She has no idea what to do with herself now.

“Clarke,” Raven’s voice breaks the fragile silence and she lifts her head from where it had been slumped against her arm. It’s the first word she’s spoken throughout this whole thing. “Maybe you should just try to get some sleep,”

It’s probably the least helpful bit of advice she could have given. There’s no way that Clarke will be able to fall asleep anywhere other than in Bellamy’s arms, not after last night.

She closes her eyes and knocks her head way too harshly against the side of a car she can’t even identify anymore. The bang brings with it every dangerous symptom that she has self-diagnosed over the past couple of days, lurching them into full force. She keeps her eyes tightly shut, knowing that if she opens them, she won’t be able to hold herself together.

“I was going to ask you to forgive him,” she mutters, all emotion drained from her voice. “I thought you guys would be mature enough to be okay with each other for just another day,”

“If it were anything else-”

“But it wouldn’t _be_ anything else, Raven. I’m dying and you’re all playing up to an argument that has no legs whatsoever. You don’t understand: I want you to have each other,”

And that’s all that is left to say because Bellamy still hasn’t come back and the longer he stays away, the more Clarke feels her fight sap away. She can hear her heart beating in her ears, thumping away fast and shallow like a rabbit’s.

When at least an hour has passed and no one has said anything, Clarke decides that that was probably the worst goodbyes in the history of goodbyes.

Somebody slinks off a while later, probably Octavia to go and see to her brother and Clarke finds she hasn’t got the energy to care right now. If Bellamy would just come back over then she could whisper sweet nothings about how much he means to her. If he’d just come back over the she could curl up in his arms and ignore the tension hovering over them all like an electric charge.

She opens her eyes again to find only Murphy and Raven sat around their imaginary center, both curled up subtly against each other: in a way that you have to crane your eyes to see, in a way that will never be Clarke and Bellamy. Him and her are too obnoxious for subtlety.

“You happy?” she asks Murphy when she flicks her head over to see the Blakes both turned away, tepeed against each other.

He looks up in surprise, clearly having thought she was asleep. She’s too tired to sleep. Too sick to sleep.

“Are you feeling any better?” he counters like that means anything.

“I feel worse,”

“Well, then I’m not happy,”

He shrugs unapologetically and throws over his water bottle to land on Clarke’s left.

“You’re being a dick,” she tells him, and ignores the bottle.

“I know,”

Another shrug, another unashamed tilt of the head.

“Is that how you loved Emori?”

It isn’t meant to be a jab, not at all. Clarke hasn’t got it in her to be vindictive right now. He still winces and Raven still makes a bit of a grunt, raising her head from Murphy’s shoulder and shuffling away from him to give him some space.

Clarke only asks because she’s genuinely curious. Of all people, he’d made out like he understands love the least.

Once he has recovered from the shock of her asking such a blunt question, Murphy matches his eyes to hers and flickers his eyebrows challengingly.

“It’s how I should have loved her,” he answers her. There is regret clear in his voice. “Why else do you think I’m pushing so much?”

She honestly has no idea, no clue as to why he seems so confident with his argument.

“Bellamy has the chance to love you like he should, and he’s pissing it up the wall because he cares too much,”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Clarke says, because it doesn’t. “And I don’t want him to love me like you want him to… I don’t want him to love me at all,”

“But we don’t get to decide that,”

“Then you can’t decide how we do it,”

“Doesn’t mean I’m not right,”

Clarke scoffs and he doesn’t push any harder, seemingly content with being on opposite sides of this. But Clarke doesn’t want there to be any sides at all.

“I think, if given the chance, Emori would have been happy with any sort of love you could have given her. She wouldn’t want the people around her to make it sound like it wasn’t enough,”

He watches her, calculating, silent because they’ve always been able to understand each other without words. He must read that Clarke wants this spoken though, she wants this out there so that when she lets go, she doesn’t have to wonder if she’s made her point clear.

Raven shifts around awkwardly, but this isn’t about her. Emori isn’t coming back, and this is about how Murphy, if he ever gets to that again, looks at love.

“You say that like the wrong kind of love is better than nothing,” he scoffs.

But Bellamy’s love isn’t wrong. Maybe he won’t ever see that.

“Isn’t it?”

“Well look at what it did to me,” he gestures to himself, waving a hand flippantly and finishing at his head so that Clarke gets what he is referring to. “And look at what it did to her,”

He says it without any emotion in his voice, and Clarke doesn’t understand how he can master that. How he can hide how much that breaks him.

“My wrong love for her killed her in the end,”

“That’s not true,” Clarke argues.

“I wasn’t strong enough to make it to her, and if she’d let anyone else get close then that might have had a different ending,”

This is the first time he’s talking about Emori in front of Raven, if the way Raven is looking at him, clinging to his every word, is anything to go by. Is this really how he sees himself? He really thinks this low of his own strength, his own power.

“I’m not just saying this for you, Clarke. You’ve got the easy way out: you are the one who gets to die. You are the one who gets to end it knowing that your love helped him. He’s the one who’s going to have to survive, the one who will have to make it through with the weight of his wrong love on his shoulders,”

She wants to believe him. She wants to buy in to the way he is telling her this, sounding so wise and so certain of his own mindset.

But she can’t because Bellamy’s love _isn’t_ wrong.

“What do you want me to do, Murphy?” she asks, feeling like this conversation is going to lead to nothing but more hurt.

“I want you to live,” he shrugs, but the look she sends his way sets him straight and he rolls his eyes to rethink. “I don’t want you to do anything Clarke,”

“Then let me love him while I still can, until the end, just like you let Emori do with you,”

“But I didn’t know any better back then,”

“And neither do I,” she shrugs back, reclaiming ignorance because she and Bellamy are not Murphy and Emori. They are two completely different people, and they are going to love each other in a different way.

They might not be able to say they’re in love, but Clarke can still love him the way she loves Raven, need him the way she needs Octavia, rely on him the way she relies on Murphy. And if she wants him just that little bit more, then she can do that too. She can die along with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Tore my shirt to stop you bleeding'  
> \- When the party's over, Billie Eilish


	18. On my knees and out of luck

Clarke gives up after another hour. Trying to sleep is going to be nothing but futile without him next to her. Raven and Murphy have dropped into a whole other shade of quietness. It’s like they are already in mourning.

When she announces that she’s going to stretch her legs, neither of them say anything. Raven does shoot her head up, getting ready to be Clarke’s crutch if she needs it, but Clarke brushes her off and lets her know that she hasn’t lost all mobility in her feet.

She stands, wobbles and has to catch herself on the side of a car, hoping the others haven’t noticed the stumble. If they do, they don’t mention it and at least that’s _something_.

When Clarke realizes that, now that she’s stood up, she’s going to have actually move, she doesn’t know which way to go. She takes her bow from where Raven’s stuff has been rested against a nearby cab, knowing that there is no way she’s going to be able to use it either way. She can’t even feel her hand anymore, and even if she could, the dizziness in her mind would stop her from seeing straight, from having any sort of accurate aim. Her reflexes have been shot to hell.

She still takes it and loads it with an arrow from inside her bag.

Left or right… it shouldn’t be so hard to decide and yet she has the feeling that Bellamy and Octavia are going to be pissed off with her. Clarke doesn’t understand how they are all skipping the blame over her like pebbles over waves.

But there isn’t really a choice in the matter: she’ll always drift towards where Bellamy is, even if she shouldn’t. Telling herself that going left is the logical decision, because now she won’t be left alone in the dark, Clarke starts to walk toward the truck that the Blakes are leaning against.

Still facing away from her, they won’t see her creep up on them before they hear her. The steps Clarke takes are smaller than she’d normally make but it’s a lot harder trying to walk in a straight line than she thought it would be.

She uses the roofs of the chained cars as a rail to hold on to and slows down even more when she gets to the truck. ‘ _He walked away for a reason,’_ is what Murphy had said. It was because he didn’t want to be around Clarke. She tries to figure out whether or not to approach them and makes the smallest movement: a turn to head back, until Octavia’s head spins around and she catches sight of her.

“Clarke, you should be sleeping,” O whispers softly, more of a hiss, but Clarke doesn’t look to her.

Now that her cover has been blown, she looks at Bellamy to see if he’s going to have any sort of reaction and he doesn’t do anything. Octavia must understand Clarke’s hesitation because she nods her over wordlessly, and fidgets away from him so that she’s made some room in the middle for another person.

It’s the push that Clarke needs, the yank on the chord that pulls her forward. She wants to make it look like she’s all put together, like she doesn’t need anyone’s help, and she thinks she does a good job with that until she reaches the bumper of the pick-up and trips over nothing but thin air.

Bellamy’s arms are around her waist before she even knows it, and she’s being brought into his center in the space of time that it would have taken her to hit the ground.

He swings her around himself, so that she lands exactly where Octavia gestured for her to sit. His hands snap away from her the second he’s made sure that she’s stable again.

That small bit of contact is a tease. It’s a flash of what she needs, and an assertion that she can’t have it.

When Clarke has settled in properly, she shuffles to face what the two either side of her were looking out to, expecting to see something odd with the way they aren’t taking their eyes from it. There’s nothing out there: nothing new. Just more cars abandoned haphazardly along the highway in a never-ending chain.

Bellamy is breathing so quietly that she can barely even hear him, his arms folded across his chest like he’s trapping them, preventing them from going anywhere else. Clarke doesn’t dare look at him.

Octavia is fully perched on top of the bonnet of the truck, legs swinging and hitting the bumper like she’s waiting for something.

“I don’t want to close my eyes and see something that isn’t there,” Clarke whispers when no one says anything, and the silence becomes too heavy. She’s referring to the hallucinated Bellamy her own drained mind thought up a few hours ago, because if that’s what will expose itself while she’s awake, then Clarke doesn’t even want to think about what she will dream. “I’m losing my mind.”

“We’ll still be here when you wake up,” Octavia answers, sounding like she feels sorry for her. Bellamy says nothing, just holds his breath when Clarke leans a little more towards him.

“But what if I don’t wake up?” Clarke asks it as she turns her head to him, wanting to watch and wait for any sort of reaction. She doesn’t get the one she was hoping for, he only sucks in another sharp, wet breath and releases it heavily into the night, not even sparing a glance to her.

He does sound choked as he does it, like he’s trying to keep in all of the emotion, hiding it from her. It’s the smallest of cracks in a door almost pulled shut. It’s enough.

“You said you’d hold on,” O reminds her.

“I said I’d try,”

“Has Murphy stopped being a dick yet?”

“No,” Clarke shakes her head guiltily. “He doesn’t think he’s wrong,”

Bellamy’s voice shocks her so much that the whole truck rumbles.

“That’s because he isn’t,” is all he says, and shoves his head so that he’s looking out to the side. A full one-eighty away from Clarke like the sight of her is making him want to throw up.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,”

He doesn’t answer her, and she can’t even catch a glimpse of his face.

“I should probably just give you guys some-”

“No, O, you don’t have to leave,” Bellamy snaps, harshly. Clarke hears it loud and clear. She moves to stand up again because Bellamy ignoring her is even worse than listening to the others arguing.

“It’s okay,” she shakes her head to Octavia, unable to take her eyes away from Bellamy. “I’ll go,”

He turns his neck even further, imitating a kid ignoring his friends after a fight, his arms folded petulantly.

“Clarke,” Octavia says in a way that makes it known that she’s going to be listened to. “Stay.”

Clarke can feel the brunette eyeing her brother with just as much intent as she is. He’s still refusing to so much as lift his head in their direction. They wait, and Clarke thinks she catches him blinking a little more than he normally does. It’ll probably just be the wind… or something.

“I’ll go,” she says again, as though this time it might get through to him.

“I’m too tired anyway. I was going to go to sleep a while ago,”

“Then I’ll come with you,”

Octavia looks at her brother for a few more moments, waiting and willing him to do something, anything. He doesn’t and her resolve seems to crash and burn as she turns to Clarke and jumps off of the lifted bonnet, holding her bent arm out for Clarke to latch on to.

Clarke takes it and wrenches her gaze from Bellamy because if he’s going to try this hard to make them a lost cause, if he really doesn’t want this that badly, then she won’t force it to happen.

She takes the time to breathe out, and breathe in again, suddenly feeling even more lightheaded and preparing herself for a night of bad dreams and no sleep. She takes Octavia’s crooked arm in hers and they both share a consoling glance before Octavia starts to move away and Clarke begins to follow.

And then there is a hand in hers- the one not linked to O’s- and she is being pulled backwards, almost torn in half by the force of either sibling. She doesn’t mean to let go of Octavia’s elbow, but she slips out and stumbles backwards, nonetheless.

O doesn’t seem surprised in the slightest, she just whips her head back around and allows the smallest smile to sprint across her face before she nods her head and starts to skip away, off into the shadows and back to the pair that she can’t bear to look at right now.

Reeling from the tug of Bellamy’s hand, Clarke falls into him for the second time in ten minutes, but this time he doesn’t shove her away just as quickly. And she spins into him, his arm flicking out to make her twirl awkwardly. She lands with the back of her head tucked underneath his jaw, leaning into him, her feet sheltered by the spread of his legs keeping them steady and upright.

So, she can’t even see his face, all she can hear is the hum of his breath against her hair and the ticking of his heart beneath her back.

“Stay,” he whispers into her ear, with that same broken voice that he used in the school bus. His arms are around her and clutching to his own shirt, anchoring Clarke to him completely.

“Okay,”

Clarke lolls her head back on to his shoulder to look at him, but Bellamy just carries on staring straight forward and avoiding her gaze completely.

“So, Octavia filled you in?”

“She didn’t have to,”

He is wearing a smile, but it’s more of a grimace because Clarke can’t see any trace of amusement, or happiness in it. She doesn’t know what to say.

“Murphy might not talk a lot but when he does… that point gets through loud and fucking clear,”

Still, he’s trying to laugh about the whole thing and yet he sounds more bitter than anything else. All Clarke can do is look at him, watch the painfully strong bite of his jaw, watch the way his temples roll down his forehead in concentration, watch how his poker face is only kept intact because he keeps blinking for a few seconds too long every time.

She just wants him to look at her too. Then she’ll be able to say everything she means with her eyes, but he is adamantly watching the crackled horizon.

“You heard all of it?” she asks, craning more on his shoulder.

“Every word,” Bellamy shrugs back, like it means absolutely nothing at all. “Every single word. I didn’t know he’d found someone before we picked him up,”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He didn’t tell any of us,”

He told me, Clarke thinks. She rolls her head back to follow his gaze because waiting for him to look at her has become pointless; he’s made it clear that he isn’t interested.

“He lost her in Nebraska,”

“I figured,”

“Why won’t you look at me?” she asks, unable to stop the question from coming out. She doesn’t turn to him because she’s scared of what she’ll see. Bellamy nods his head forward, landing it into the back of her neck and his breath hits her skin warmly.

“Do you believe him?”

“Do I believe what?”

“I can’t say it out loud,” he whispers, shaking his head against the back of hers. “I can’t,”

“He said a lot of stuff, Bell,”

“Yeah,” he snorts. “He did,”

“Then tell me which bit you’re talking about,”

He sighs against her and his eyelashes flutter against her grimy head.

“Do you believe that this is wrong?” he stutters over the next few words, enough to make Clarke wonder if he’s trying to stop himself from saying something else. “Do you believe that my… that what I feel for you is wrong?”

“Do you?” she asks and turns her head to try to see him, but Bellamy just follows her and noses some more into her neck so that she can’t.

He doesn’t answer her. He doesn’t need to. It’s obvious from the way he won’t even meet Clarke’s eyes that he has bought into what Murphy was saying.

“I just don’t want you to get hurt. That’s all. What they were saying… they made it sound like I’m going to break you. I really don’t want to break you,” she tells him.

“I don’t want you to break me either. I want you to live,” he says like that’s still possible.

“Bellamy,” she whispers, because that’s not what she was trying to say.

“I have been selfish. I know that but I don’t know how else to do this. They said… about me not being able to stay strong… but I’ve never been able to pretend with you Clarke. I couldn’t pretend that I liked you when I couldn’t stand you. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want you at Christmas. I couldn’t pretend, or even try to play along, when you convinced yourself that you were a failure. I couldn’t pretend that I was anywhere close to being ready to lose you when your face got all cut up. So, I don’t know how to pretend to be strong about all of this. I’m selfish and I know that, but I don’t know how to stop,”

“I never- I didn’t ask you to be strong,”

“But you shouldn’t have to ask me. Murphy was right, Clarke. When you… feel this way about someone, when you feel the way I do about you, I shouldn’t have had to be asked,”

“Bellamy stop beating yourself up,” she begs, and tries to take a different tactic to turn her waist around in his arms before she turns her head. When his arms clamp down even harder, to completely restrict the movement, she snaps. “Will you for God’s sake just look at me!”

The shout seems to make him wilt. His arms stay wrapped around her, but they fall slack, and Clarke takes the moment of stunned silence to spin before he can stop her again. His head has fallen forward, curls falling into his eyes, ashamed and embarrassed.

Clarke’s hands shoot up to cup Bellamy’s cheeks without hesitation, without giving him a chance to catch her out again. She practically yanks his head upwards, desperate and ignoring the way the world feels like it is tipping beneath her feet.

His eyes are still trained to the ground, to their kissing boots, adamant.

“I can’t give you what you need,” he whispers, even quieter still.

“You have given me everything,” she tells him because it’s right. He has given her everything she could possibly want anymore.

“Stop convincing yourself that that is anywhere close to being true,” Bellamy shakes his head, losing it a little. “Stop trying to help me, Clarke! Look at the state of you. Can’t you see that this,” he shoves his way out from between the bonnet of the truck and her grasp, pulling away and gesturing violently between the two of them. “This is what I’m talking about. This is what _they_ were talking about when they said I’m being selfish. You deserve someone who won’t get caught up in how broken they’re about to become, you deserve someone who will pull themselves back together after you’re gone because that’s how strong you are. That’s how resilient and undefeatable you are-”

Clarke reaches out for him again, the pressure behind her eyes starting to become way too much. If he sees her cry then he’s just going to blame himself more, but the more he puts himself down, the more it makes her want to melt down.

“You aren’t giving yourself enough credit, Bell. I know that you’ll be okay when I’m gone. I know who you are,”

He laughs again. It sounds disgusting; it sounds malicious and hungry for a fight.

“You’re talking shit and you know it.”

“Bellamy you’ve given me everything,” she repeats, voice as steady as she can keep it because he needs to know how sure she is of all of this. “You’ve carried me for days. You’ve held my hair back when I threw up, you’ve cleaned me up when I wasn’t even strong enough to open my eyes-”

“I’ve done nothing for you. Nothing that Raven couldn’t have done,”

“But I didn’t want _Raven_ to do any of that for me!” Clarke stomps her foot childishly. She just wants him to look her in the eye. She just wants him to hold her like he has done for weeks.

“I’m not enough,” he whispers when the tumbleweed has drifted over them and run away again. “And you can’t make me enough. And even if you could… you shouldn’t have to. That’s not how this is supposed to work,”

She can only slip backwards to the bonnet of the truck, all the words snatched from her tongue at the decidedness in his voice, at the space he is resolutely keeping between them. The tops of her legs collide with the icy metal bumper and Clarke feels like she’s been punched in the stomach.

Bellamy stays where he is: both hands raised in front of him to stop her from getting any closer, his head drooping over so he doesn’t have to look into Clarke’s face, so she can’t see his.

There might only be a few feet between them, but there may as well be acres.

“If that’s how you feel…” she mumbles, willing herself to look anywhere but at her boots and failing miserably. “If you feel like we’re wrong then I’ve got nothing to say,”

Because she hasn’t. She’s not got one word left that might be able to convince him that the two of them are better when they are together. He’s even taken to shrugging his hands into the pockets of his pants, like this is just any conversation.

It’s dark and they’re both refusing to look at the other one, so Clarke doesn’t see his nod, she just feels it.

“Yeah,” he sighs after gulping, sounding relieved. “Yeah there isn’t any more to say,”

Clarke bobs her head at the ground and tries to swallow the lump in her throat. She takes a minute to blink hurriedly, willing away the tears.

“Right,”

“You should get back, we’ve got a long day tomorrow,”

She shoots her gaze up in surprise, wondering how tomorrow might be any different to today.

“No, you go,” Clarke says, throwing her head jerkily over to the camp and unable to regret the way the world wobbles from the movement. “I can’t sleep,”

He hesitates to ask, even taking a few shuffled steps in the direction of his sister, and then he whirls back around at the other end of the truck, forcing Clarke to turn to face him. With his arm hanging heavy at his neck, Bellamy lets his face tear itself up before he questions her.

“Why?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Clarke asks, bracing herself on the truck.

“You say that like you expect me to read your mind,”

“That’s because…” no, maybe not. She trails off and doesn’t really know what to tell him. she doesn’t even know how she should feel about all of this: too faded and too far gone to feel connected to her own body. Clarke decides to go on the offensive. “You’re really telling me that you’re actually going to be able to over there and get your head down?”

“I’m not the one looking like she hasn’t slept in weeks,” he bristles, and she hates it because she can’t even see the tenderness in his eyes.

“Wow, you’re really pulling out all the lines tonight, aren’t you Bell?”

“I’m not trying to cause problems. I’m trying to get you what you need,”

Clarke lifts the only hand that has any senses left to it, rubbing it into her eyes and dodging the scabs beginning to peel.

“You don’t get to choose what I need,” she growls, finally deciding that she knows exactly how she should feel about this. “None of you do,”

“I know that but-”

“What are you doing, Bellamy?” Clarke asks and stomps forward, keeping her hand trailing over the side of the truck to get closer. “Huh? How is this helping any of us? You’re complaining about not being strong enough, and now you’re buying into the shit that Murphy has been throwing around,”

He stumbles back when Clarke approaches, then regains his footing and steps back to where he was, probably realizing that now is not a time to back down.

“It’s not buying into it, I agree with everything he said, Clarke. This didn’t come from nowhere; it’s what we’ve been thinking for days,”

“Who is we?” she rushes, foot stomping again because she can’t help losing her temper. “Because I certainly don’t believe any of that. Your sister was back there fighting your corner completely,”

“I heard that,” he grumbles, getting louder.

“You knew getting into whatever this is that we wouldn’t last forever. I told you so many fucking times that we couldn’t push us because of this exact reason, and you were the one who kept trying-”

“Because I was naïve,”

“Yeah, you were,”

“But I didn’t think-”

“No, Bellamy, you didn’t think,”

“I didn’t think it would be _you_ in this position!” he shouts out of nowhere.

Clarke ignores the pleading in his voice, the way his eyes shoot to hers now for the first time and they say so much more than what she expected.

“What are you talking about?” she demands, throat scratchy.

Bellamy shuffles awkwardly and Clarke doesn’t let his gaze slip away now that she’s finally caught it.

“If you’re talking crap, Bellamy, then I don’t want to hear it,”

“It’s not crap,” he argues, harsh again. “I told myself that I wouldn’t let you get hurt. I made a promise to keep you safe,”

“And I’ve told you that I don’t need protecting,” Clarke snaps, trying to give her words some sort of integrity because they must sound ridiculous while she looks so close to death.

“I didn’t care!”

The shout bounces across each and every car that lines the highway and Bellamy has to take a deeper breath before he carries on.

“I didn’t care because I wanted you more than I believed I would lose you. And trust me Clarke, I knew I’d lose you, but I didn’t think it’d be like this. I didn’t think I’d have to be forced into the reality of learning to live without you. That’s how much I wanted you. I knew that eventually I’d have to let go and I still wanted you more,”

“So, this is just all about sex?”

When she asks it, Clarke knows it’s every shade of wrong but she’s so angry she doesn’t care.

He doesn’t even dignify that with an answer.

“You knew I would die eventually, Bellamy. You had to have known that this would have been cut short,”

“And can you blame me for knowing that I’m not okay with that?” he snaps.

“I can blame you for trying so hard to convince me that I was just being pessimistic, and then pushing me away the second you realized I was right,”

“If that were true, I’d have said all of this days ago,”

“Then why now?” Clarke demands and she trips on the next step forward.

Bellamy brings his hand up to his head, runs his fingers through his hair hurriedly and takes her in, bracing himself.

“We’re just going around in circles now, Clarke,” he sighs heavily.

“And we’re going to keep going around in them because I don’t have the time to wait anymore Bellamy,”

“That!” he bursts, throwing his finger forward so that it almost knocks her nose. “Right there. You say that and you expect me to just sit here and nod along like I can bear you only having days left,”

There is sweat dripping down off the back of Clarke’s neck, rolling down in beads despite the chill. His hair is all over the place and hers mustn’t look much better because she hasn’t touched it in days. If her breath wasn’t toxic, if her face wasn’t green, if her vision was clear, Clarke would jump on him now.

She’d reach her breaking point and she’d take to the only way she might be able to reconnect with him. She’d tug his head down to hers with the only force she has left, and she’d kiss him and bite him and love him with that movement.

“You think I can bear it?” she asks, quieter because she has to stumble over a stutter. “You think I like having that much time left to live? It breaks my heart, Bell,”

His eyes go liquid when she whispers it.

“It breaks my heart because I wanted so much more than just this. I wanted a life where I could help people, and where I could protect my family from this, and where I could watch myself grow as a person. And it breaks my heart so much more knowing that I’ve missed out on the future I could have had with you,”

“But I made a promise,” he says back, feet shuffling forward infinitesimally.

“A promise that wasn’t yours to make. I’m in so much pain now but when I told you I want forever with you, I meant it. And we knew all along we can’t have that so I don’t know what else I can do,”

Bellamy hesitates at the edge of her, at the borderline of reaching out.

“We just have to make the most of what we have left, like we have done for so long. You think I need you to be strong but that’s only half of it: I need you to just make the most of what we have before I never get to see you again,”

He makes a sound: distraught.

“It kills me to see you like this,”

“I know. And it kills me to see you like this,” she answers, gesturing to him and all of his uncertainty. “But I know that you are what makes me feel more alive, Bell. And I need that too,”

There is a hand to her cheek, a thumb over her eye so she has to close them both.

“None of that takes away what Murphy said,” Bellamy whispers, but she knows she’s already won this. His thumb strokes across her eyelid so lightly it’s barely there.

Clarke growls under her breath.

“I’m going to actually kill him,”

“You know when you say things like that, you both sound an awful lot like me and O,”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not going to kill him,”

“Clarke,” he sighs, fingers latching around her jaw. “I’m being serious,”

“I know, so am I,”

“Clarke,”

“Do you really agree with what he was saying?”

She asks him, hoping that they can have an actual conversation now that he’s not trying desperately to push her away. She’s leaning further into his space; hands hovering about to press into his chest as her legs sit between both of his.

“I don’t know,” Bellamy tells her and meets her eyes undeniably now. At least he doesn’t look ashamed anymore. “Octavia told me I’m being an idiot for sulking; said the heroes never get the girl by sitting around and running away. But that’s just it isn’t it: I’m not the hero,”

“Bell-”

“No, Clarke, I should have stayed and listened to what you had to say but I just couldn’t hear you say goodbye. So… Murphy isn’t wrong,”

“No, maybe not,”

“I wish he was,”

“So do I,”

They don’t say anything as Clarke sways under his caress, focusing on the way he is holding her. She can feel his eyes beating down on her face, but her own stay closed, blocked by his fingers like he doesn’t want her to see what he’s looking at her like.

“Did he tell you that he warned me not to hurt you?”

“No,” Clarke shakes her head lightly. “Octavia did,”

“Remind me to never tell her anything ever again,”

She can feel him roll her eyes even with hers closed.

“What did you tell him to get him off your back?” she asks, tilting her face to the side curiously, content with being held like this. His other hand creeps up to her waist, tugging her into his space even more. This, no matter what, is always going to be her favorite place to be. She wants him to hold her for the rest of her life.

“I probably shouldn’t say,” she hears him gush, picturing the way blood rushes to his ears. “Maybe I’ll tell you if we make it to Vancouver,”

“I’d like to know,”

“No you wouldn’t,” Bellamy tells her, resolute. “We want this to hurt as little as possible, right?”

“Right,” Clarke sighs, smile fading, saddened at the thought that she’ll never get to know.

“It’s okay if I say this sucks, isn’t it?”

“Bellamy I’m dying. It’s allowed to suck,”

“How are you so calm about this?” he asks but he doesn’t sound angry.

“I’m not dying in the way I thought I would. I guess that counts for something; it makes me feel like I haven’t failed… even if,” even if that’s not quite true. “And I’m not dying alone,”

“Open your eyes,”

Clarke does exactly as she’s told and is surprised when her eyes flash open to see his face as close to hers as it is, with his nose just about to brush hers and his irises burning in the darkness. Straight into hers.

“What?” she whispers, because speaking any louder than this would probably break something between them. She can feel the shy smile on her face as it starts to seep away, thrown by the intimacy.

She’s still snotty, still grossly and unnaturally sweaty. She doesn’t know why he’s pulling her into him so snugly and would push away if it weren’t for the way his arm has looped instinctively around her waist.

Clarke doesn’t dare pull her eyes from his. She’ll never get tired of looking into those infinite orbs of glass, how they stream honey like they’ll never run out. How he lets her soak them up, as close as she can possibly get.

“What?” she asks again, even quieter this time because his glass is about to crack.

The corners of his lips turn up, smiling gently and almost sweet.

“Just… you,” he muses, his teeth flashing perfectly in the moonlight.

If Clarke can’t catch her breath right now then she doesn’t care because she knows that Bellamy will breathe for her if he has to.

She can see his lips in her periphery, she can see how they’ve been lapped up by his tongue, how he’s teasing them with his own mouth, like he’s prepping them for hers.

“Just everything you are,”

Bellamy’s chin lifts just a touch and Clarke rises to it too.

“I thought there might come a time where I get tired of just looking at you, but I don’t think it’s possible now. I’ll never get sick of seeing your face,”

“Swear it not to the stars,” Clarke mumbles, her rotting hand hidden behind his back as she throws her arm over his shoulders.

Bellamy gushes, and it’s definitely a sight for sore eyes. He drops his head and chuckles lowly. When he looks back up, Bellamy seems to let the smile run away instantly because Clarke has brought herself even further into his space and they’re only a hair’s breadth away from each other.

She doesn’t dare look into his eyes, not now that she’s caught sight of his mouth, his slightly trembling lips.

“Don’t kiss me,” she pleads when their noses start to brush past each other.

“I wasn’t going to,” Bellamy tells her, voice steadier than hers, but he keeps moving forward and all they’d have to do now is purse their lips to meet.

“Don’t Bell,”

“I’m not,” he answers her again and his smile is the only thing that stops them from kissing.

“Then what are you doing?”

“Testing my own willpower,”

He says it like it’s obvious.

“Um,” Clarke chokes. “I think yours is stronger than mine,”

If they stay like this, she’s not going to be able to help herself.

“Yeah?” he asks, and his voice has dropped a lot lower now.

When his arm tightens around her waist, she decides that he’s trying to push her to make the first move, trying to make her concede and close the gap. Well, if this is going to turn into a game then she’s not going to be the one to lose it.

She takes the squeeze as an opportunity to shift her whole body closer into him. He’s already leaning against the end of the truck, supporting himself so that she can fit between his casually spread legs. With one hand already wrapped around his shoulder, Clarke hoists herself up a bit more to rest her weight against him. There’s no doubt in her mind that he’ll hold her up.

She uses the other hand, the good hand, to start at the top of the center of his ribcage; one finger trailing small circles down it.

Clarke watches the path she’s making and feels Bellamy’s eyes following the same trail diligently.

“Never one to follow the rules,” he sighs but doesn’t quite carry with it any integrity; it’s more of an invitation to carry on.

So carry on she does. Clarke swipes two of her fingers down slowly to his stomach and she grips gently to the muscles that seem to tense beneath his shirt.

“Stop showing off,” she exasperates but prods further into his abs, nonetheless, running her whole hand along the expanse of him.

“Can’t help it,” she feels him preen through a smirk as they both fight to crane their heads over the way Clarke is feeling him.

“Did someone mention willpower?”

“Hmm?” Bellamy asks, voice dangerously low. Clarke’s hand slips lower, grazing over the last abdominal muscle that flexes proudly. Yeah, she’s definitely winning, even if the sight of her fingers on him is making her even more breathless.

“Willpower,” she laughs, sounding embarrassingly out of breath.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Bellamy shifts his hip to check hers slowly, turning it into more of a touch. “I don’t have any of that. That was just a ruse to get you to make out with me,”

“Bellamy,” she sighs back, but can’t find it within her to fight back.

Her fingers reach the very edges of his t-shirt and Clarke doesn’t stop before she dips them under the lining of it, reaching to meet bare skin that she’s never touched before. Not like this.

He breathes in a sharp gasp when her hand touches his stomach and latches on to it.

“Careful,” he mumbles as a warning.

When Clarke dips her fingers a little lower, she meets the band of his pants and digs her nails into the line between his skin and the fabric.

“Clarke,”

She doesn’t go any further than this, knowing her own limits. But that doesn’t stop her from running along the length of the waistband, all the way around to his hips and back again.

“Stop trying to make me squirm,”

“I’m not trying to make you squirm,” she laughs, smirking knowingly as she lets her thumbs rest in his belt loops.

“You forget I can see your eyes,” he hums and moves his head closer into hers so he can whisper into her ear. “You look hungry,”

Bellamy leaves his head where it is, hovering just by hers so that their cheeks are brushing.

“Come here, Clarke,”

He noses at her jaw so that she has to lift her face to meet his. He doesn’t stop brushing the tip of it against her jawline rhythmically. It only takes that to take a gasp from Clarke, and she knows she’s starting to lose her control over all of this pretty quickly.

Then Bellamy moves his face down and presses into the corner where her neck meets her shoulder, arms so tight around her waist that her feet are hovering ever so slightly over the ground; the tips of her boots resting against the top of his feet.

When his lips plant themselves on to her skin, Clarke can’t call it anything else other than what it is. It’s a kiss and it’s intentional and it means _something_. But Bellamy knows exactly what he’s doing because the way he drifts his lips over the inside of her collar is too hot to function. His lips are warmer than the sun, that smoky breath is already fusing with her skin and if he’s pulling, sucking a little then she definitely won’t be complaining.

Clarke’s fingers tighten some more into his belt loops, and she braces herself on the waistband of his pants, sighing contentedly as he laps at her.

“Bell,” she hums and curls her elbow some more around his neck hungrily. He answers her with a growl against her skin, sounding more intoxicated than the night in the cottage.

His mouth moves to the base of her neck, kissing harder when he reaches it.

“I knew you’d taste good,” he tells her, voice wrecked between kisses. “I never thought you could taste this good,”

Clarke grips a little harder into the skin of his stomach, nails digging deeper. His lips keep moving tantalizingly and teasing all the way across the base of her neck, pressing gentle and shy kisses to the skin he can get to.

“I’m gross,” she mumbles, lifting herself a little higher around his shoulders so that she can arch up into his mouth. Clarke is awarded with a soft groan and the opening of his lips against her neck. The way he moves becomes less graceful, less fragile, but he still moves in that mockingly slow way, like he has all the time in the world.

“Don’t care,”

“This isn’t what I meant when I said we should make the most of it,”

“I’m tired of not knowing what you feel like against me, Clarke,” Bellamy sighs and tears the desperate open mouthed kisses from her neck so that he can nose softly at the skin again.

“So am I,” she whispers back, trying to shove down the butterflies running through her stomach.

“Good,”

His mouth latches back at her neck, moving with its own volition and winding its way up the height of Clarke’s throat. When his tongue runs along his bottom lip, purposefully on the edge of touching her, she gulps and pushes her head back a little more to give him some better access.

Tightening one arm around her waist even more snugly, grinding her into him again, Bellamy lifts the other carefully along the side of Clarke’s body. He drags the tips of his fingers over her hip, up and around her chest and brings it to the base of her collar to lift it to her pulse point. He presses slightly, just enough for them both to hear her heartbeat radiate into the space, non-existent space between them.

“Bell,”

“Clarke,”

“This is a bad idea,” Clarke gasps when his tongue actually lands on to her skin, brushing the crevice at her jaw.

“This is a really really bad idea,” he agrees, and the words make his teeth graze at the bone.

“If we take this any further, I won’t be able to let go,”

“Me neither,”

“Then… Bell,” she whispers and brings both of her hands reluctantly to push at his chest, one hand palm up to stop from making it any worse.

He seems to get the message well enough; he crashes his head on to her covered shoulder and sighs heavily, as though he might be able to blow away all of the sexual tension wafting around, even while Clarke is disgustingly ill.

“This sucks,” he groans and lifts his head to look Clarke in the eyes once they’ve both managed to catch their breaths.

“It really does,” she admits, swiping a thumb over his heart to make sure it’s still safe and sound.

“I’m never going to get to kiss you like I want to, am I?” Bellamy sighs, resigned.

Clarke feels her heart shatter just that bit more.

“No, Bell,”

“Okay,”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” he stutters over it and she can hear the lie in his voice, but this is Bellamy being completely unselfish, and Clarke will never not be in love with him.

 

…

 

Clarke expects to wake up in Bellamy’s arms the next morning, so when consciousness first hits her along with the iced breeze, and she notices the familiar rocking sensation of being carried, she thinks nothing of it and just snuggles deeper into the crooked elbow.

It doesn’t take much longer than that to realize all of the other elements that give way to the fact that Bellamy isn’t the one holding her: like the much bonier arms, the rare but itchy strands of chocolate hair tickling at her nose, the way Clarke’s thighs are curled against the curve of breasts that Bellamy definitely didn’t have this time yesterday.

As soon as it sinks in that Bellamy isn’t here, Clarke throws her head forward and flashes her eyes open in panic. The world seems to have a bit of a pinkish haze, not unlike the way it looked on the day that she cut her face up. She doesn’t have to look down to her arm to know that the veiny spider is still crawling its way up her wrist, legs inching out readily.

Raven is already looking down at her and her face is all torn up in concern.

“You’re awake?”

She sounds surprised, like it should be normal for Clarke to sleep another day away.

“How long have I been out?” Clarke asks, raising the back of her hand to rub at her eyes, swiping away the dried snot and gunk from her sickened face.

“Go back to sleep, you don’t need to be up,”

Raven squeezes at her tighter, as a way of reassurance but Clarke can’t see Bellamy even when she cranes her head over Raven’s shoulder.

“Where’s Bellamy?” she says and squirms a little too much for Raven to keep a hold of her. Clarke doesn’t know how she manages to wriggle out of her grip without landing flat on her ass, but before she knows it, she’s stood unevenly on her boots. “Where’s Murphy?”

He’s not here either. The only other person in her visibility is Octavia walking a few steps behind them.

“They had to go on ahead,”

Raven keeps the emotion out of her voice so as not to give anything away.

“What? Why?”

“Wait, they didn’t tell you?” Octavia asks, pushing forward and wearing a look of outrage.

Clarke doesn’t think she can handle any more secrets, any more unspoken truths because her head feels like it’s about to explode with everything.

“Tell me what?” she growls, fingers at her temples to try to banish some of the ringing that isn’t really coming from anywhere.

“Raven you should have told her,”

Ignoring Octavia decidedly, Raven keeps her gaze focused on to Clarke. She looks uncertain, like she doesn’t know how to figure anything out anymore.

“Is this about what you found last night?” Clarke asks, shrugging her shoulders out and trying to stand out straighter in case it might ease the pain spreading like a tumor.

While Raven doesn’t say anything, her piercing glare is enough of an answer.

“We might have had to take a bit of a detour,” Octavia sighs, shoving Raven out of the way when it becomes clear she doesn’t know how to answer.

“What do you mean?”

The two girls exchange a look between each other, deciding how much Clarke needs to know and how much of it will be better left unsaid.

“City center,” Raven nods, over to somewhere behind Clarke. “We’re coming up to it. There’s a hospital there,”

Clarke opens her mouth to respond but before she can make so much as a sound, her stomach turns a full three-sixty and it lurches her forward, hunching her over to a black cab- the closest and only car she can reach.

She doesn’t throw up no matter how much her body begs her to; she hasn’t eaten a thing in days so there is nothing but water in her system. She stands, curved tightly around the metal door to crane over it and heaves up nothing but spent air.

There is a shoulder under each of her own, trying to take some of the weight off of her feet. Two minutes. She barely made it two minutes before she couldn’t support her own skeleton on her own.

“Hey, you’re okay,” Raven coos into her ear but it doesn’t really reach anywhere. It’s like calling for someone under water: eventually the shout just gets drowned out.

“You need,” Clarke breathes raggedly, hating the taste of her own breath. “You need to get to Vancouver,”

“Clarke-”

“Going into the middle of a city is not going to do anything you think it’ll do,”

“This is why we didn’t tell her,” Raven whispers harshly across the back of her neck over to Octavia.

“It’s more than a risk,” she heaves, fingers turning white at the edges of the roof of the cab. “A risk means it might be worth something,”

Stars start to inch themselves into her vision, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut that she’s surprised she can see anything at all.

“Clarke, if there’s any chance at all of keeping you alive, we’re going to take it,”

“It’s too late,” she chokes out, face already sweating all over.

“It’s only too late the second your heart stops beating,”

“Where’s Bellamy?”

She asks it again because she needs to know how close they are to them; she needs to know if there’s any chance of calling them back.

“Where’s my bow?”

“It’s with Bellamy. Most of your stuff is with him too. We split it out into all of our bags before they left,”

“Well, we need to get to them,”

Clarke tears herself out of both of their grips, and stumbles forward at least a few steps before she has to take another moment and lean over another car a few feet down.

“Clarke it’s okay. We’ve planned this out, I swear,” Raven calls as they jog to catch up with her.

“When?” Clarke asks, spinning around and wincing when her legs hits something rock hard.

“While you were asleep, last night,”

“And you didn’t think to ask me what I thought?”

“I knew you’d react like this. You’d tell us not to go,”

“You’re damn right I would,” Clarke scoffs, her voice sounding wet. “It’s a stupid plan.”

“You haven’t even heard it yet,”

“That’s because you won’t talk to me!”

“We only figured it out last night!”

“Clarke,” Octavia snaps, but she doesn’t seem angry at all so Clarke drifts towards her to listen, tension seeping out of her shoulders. “We all agreed Murphy and Bell would go ahead so that they can reach the city center as soon as possible. That way you don’t have to be brought into the thick of it unless you have to be,”

“And Bellamy agreed to this?”

She doesn’t want to believe that he’d just up and leave her. Not after last night. But he’s not here and that means there isn’t really much else to believe.

“Yeah,” his sister shrugs, lips clamping shut immediately after like there’s something she’s missing out.

“Okay…”

Clarke tries to process what’s going on. Having only just woken up, and feeling as shitty as she does, it’s not the easiest thing to comprehend.

“So we’re going to meet them at the city?”

“We agreed we’d follow the highway so that there isn’t any chance of missing each other. If they don’t find us before, we’re going to have to go to the hospital to get you the medicine ourselves,”

“What, so they’re just damage control?” she bites.

“Of a sorts,” Raven agrees flippantly, giving no indication of concern that Bellamy and Murphy are going to have to walk into at least one horde. As always, the town centers are going to be the most dangerous and Clarke dying definitely doesn’t take that away. In fact, if anything, it only makes the whole idea more risky because they’ve lost one more defender.

“Best case scenario is they find some antibiotics before we have to go in,” Octavia adds in, voice lighter than it would be if she weren’t trying to lift the spirits.

“Worse case?”

“We can’t find them. And we don’t get you help,”

Octavia says it, not because it’s easy to say, but because it’s the most direct answer to Clarke’s questions and she knows that that is all Clarke can handle right now.

“And that makes it sound worth it?”

“Any way to save you makes it worth it,” Raven cuts in, sounding impatient but sympathetic all the same.

“No,” Clarke shakes her head, shoving away what feels a lot like vertigo. “That’s not enough. We need to get them back. We need to just push forward to Vancouver and-”

“Clarke,” Octavia snaps finally, hands coming to her shoulders to shake her out. “This is it now. This is our last call for drinks. This is the last train out of the station. We’ve been given a chance to get you out of this alive and it doesn’t matter how small it is, we all need to take it. Look me in the eye and tell me that you wouldn’t be doing the same for us and I’ll run after them. I’ll sprint the whole way into the center and I’ll drag Bellamy back by the ear,”

It’s as much of a stare down as Clarke can manage with her hooded eyelids and flushed cheeks. Octavia’s gaze is piercing and determined and even though she does try to put up a good enough fight, Clarke knows that at the end of the day, the brunette is right. She would have done this for any one of them.

“I don’t want you getting your hopes up,” she whispers weakly, slumping further back into the jeep that she’s on because she can’t hold herself upright. “I’m pretty sure the hospitals were the first things to get emptied and this is only gonna be fixed by specific shit, even if it’s treatable,”

“Murphy thinks he’s seen this before,” Octavia offers, eye roaming over Clarke’s body. “He thinks he knows what he’s looking for,”

“Whatever it is, it probably won’t be there,”

“True, but if it’s anywhere, then it is only going to be there,”

“If any of you get hurt over this, I’m not going to be able to live with myself,” Clarke sighs, looking to Raven so that she definitely hears it.

“If things go so wrong that someone gets hurt, you probably won’t be living for long anyway,” Raven returns honestly. The bluntness, while it might have rubbed some people up the wrong way, makes Clarke feel a lot more at ease; all she needs is the truth.

But there’s still this nagging in the back of her mind. The thought that she has no idea how both Bellamy and Murphy are doing is excruciating. If they get hurt, she might not ever find out. She might not ever be able to help them.

And she never would have been able to say goodbye.

“Did, um, did Bellamy say goodbye to me? Did I, did I just forget it?” she stammers, hoping desperately that her melting brain has just erased that from her memory.

Octavia and Raven share another look. Another ‘how much should we tell her?’ exchange that Clarke has to stomp her foot at. One of them seems to come to a decision, and as much as Clarke has always been able to read Raven, it’s O who answers her, so she’s left clueless as to if she’s being told everything.

“I’m sorry Clarke. He didn’t want to wake you up before he left,”

It doesn’t sound right, no matter how apologetic Octavia has let her voice resonate.

“That doesn’t make sense. He wouldn’t just… leave,”

Not after everything they’ve said to each other. Not after how much he’s looked after her over the last couple of days.

“He would have stayed,”

Clarke can feel the confusion take over her face. Even if she has reluctantly accepted the plan, she doesn’t understand why Bellamy would be the one to go.

There’s another look thrown over the top of her head.

“It wasn’t a rushed decision, Clarke. We spoke about it for a while and we figured he was the best one to go,”

“And he agreed?”

He wouldn’t. She knows he wouldn’t. Not when they all know she’s got barely days left. They said they’d make the most of what they have in the time they’ve got; that’s pretty much the opposite of him being away from her.

“He did,” is all Raven answers, not meeting Clarke’s eye.

It’s the first time they’ve been separated in almost as long as she can remember. Surely it was Nebraska? That feels like a lifetime ago.

“I don’t…” she doesn’t know what she’s trying to say; her brain seems to be going into some sort of short circuit. “I can’t,”

“It’s okay, Clarke. We’ll find them, don’t worry,”

She’s trying not to, but it feels like the clock counting down her time left has just smashed. Hands frozen, and the ticking has just stopped. Not being with him has taken away a larger fraction of these precious last few days than she can admit to herself.

“He wouldn’t just leave me,” she argues, her heart slicing.

“He hasn’t left you. They’ve gone to fight for your life,”

Even if Raven sounds tired, sounds ready to move on from this, Clarke still knows that she is right. He would have said goodbye.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'On my knees and out of luck,'  
> \- After the storm, Mumford and Sons


	19. Under the exit lights, as beautiful as ever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise in advance.

Clarke takes her time to let it sink in, let it properly sink in that Bellamy isn’t right behind her. It’s okay. Once she manages to lock away all of that pain, at least for the next few minutes, she realizes that all she needs to do is get to him before her lungs give out. She’s got more drive than ever now. Maybe that was why he left. Maybe he thought it’d give her that final push. Maybe.

He’s left her in the layers that she’s stolen from him over the months. Shirt and fleece and coat and they all smell exactly like him, probably because she spent all night cuddling up to him. Or she thought she did.

“I’m going to walk on my own- No Rae,” she snaps, when Raven starts to interject. “If they’re out there risking their lives for mine, then I’m going to pull my own weight,”

“Don’t be stupid, Clarke. We aren’t idiots,”

“I don’t want to be carried,”

Raven swings on her feet, gesturing around her like the world is ready to back her up. Clarke locks her arms around her sides, knowing that’s the only thing keeping her standing straight. The brunette is rolling her eyes, sincerity gone.

“If Bellamy were here, you’d let him carry you,”

“Well he’s not here,” Clarke tells her, and takes the first step forward. Her whole body shudders at the movement and it starts to beg for relief instantly; she doesn’t give in as she shuffles forward some more. “You’ve made damn sure of that,”

“Clarke,” Octavia mumbles, catching up with her and hovering her hands around Clarke’s midriff just in case she falls.

“I get it, okay? He’s right for the job- that’s how we’ve always done it. That doesn’t mean I’m happy about all of this,”

“Grow up,” Raven bites out of nowhere, the tension in the elastic band letting loose.

“Excuse me,” Clarke snarls back, her waist driving forward because it’s the only part of her that has some rigidity.

“I said grow up. You’re acting like a fucking teenager. We’re doing all we can,”

“I know. I appreciate that,”

She really does, even if it comes out cold and superficial. She understands that they are trying their best to keep her alive, she just wishes it didn’t have to be so hard to work together.

“Then stop making out like he’s the only one that cares about you,”

“Fine,” she relents, tripping again. “Can we please talk about something else?”

Upon Raven’s curt nod, only there in Clarke’s periphery, she doesn’t struggle for a subject change, needing to take her mind off the man who may as well be miles away.

“Why the hell does Murphy know what medicine we need to get?”

“He said he’s seen it before,” Octavia shrugs casually, aiming for something lighter. “That’s all he really mentioned.”

Raven takes up the rear of their triangle, allowing Clarke to set the pace and letting O stay by her side just in case she needs to fall. They don’t notice her stop while they walk past a ruby red car that Clarke doesn’t recognize the make of, not until she announces whatever memory it hit.

“This was the first car I ever fixed,”

“This exact car?” Octavia asks, kicking at a deflated tire.

“Nah just… the model. I think I was only thirteen,”

Raven runs her fingers fondly over the roof, but Clarke sits back on another car and chooses just to watch, relieved that she’s getting a bit of a break from walking even if they’ve only been going for a few minutes.

“Shit,”

“So, did you two just not talk to each other in Boston?” Clarke asks as they start to move on again, trying her best to keep the grimace out her voice, attempting to stay civil.

“We did,” Octavia smiles, moving to check Clarke’s hip and then thinking better of it at the last second. “It’s just not all we did. Raven was off fucking anything with a pulse after Finn,”

Raven makes a hum, disapproving but smirking all the same.

“That’s been widely exaggerated,”

“And I had to actually study,” Octavia barrels forward. “Some of us aren’t natural born geniuses. I mean, I’m smart, but I’ve always had to work a little harder for the grades. I haven’t really got book smarts,”

“If it helps, you don’t need them anymore,” Clarke offers, unable to think of much else to say.

“Except when your brother’s girl needs lifesaving medicine and you have absolutely no idea what to do about it,”

“True. Though it’s not like knowing what to do would help anything. Knowing is just a bit like dangling a carrot on a stick,”

The words ‘brother’s girl’ bounce around in her head, echoing and only getting louder. She likes the sound of it, likes thinking she belongs to someone like that. Not like a possession, because it’s always been more than that.

“So you don’t know then?”

“Ironically enough, no. I’ve never seen infection this quick before. Not to the point where it affects the whole body like this. They usually shut down before it gets this far. Dead within days once it’s this bad,”

“Days…” Octavia muses, calculating something in her head. “God, it feels like months ago since I last saw you shoot,”

“Don’t remind me,” Clarke tries not to grumble.

“Your arrows are in Murphy’s bag, just if you’re wondering,”

“Why did they take it?”

“It was that or leave it behind. We thought… if the hospital didn’t turn out to be worth it then we wouldn’t need it anymore,” Raven tells her reluctantly, like she’s scared that Clarke’s heart might fail on the spot now that they’re talking about the possibility.

“Good. Practical.”

“Or, if we managed to find something, we’d be heading back that way anyway,” Octavia chirps, a lot more optimistically and sounding as though she genuinely believes what she’s saying.

“So why didn’t you just leave it?”

“We were outvoted,”

“Murphy wouldn’t have wanted to take it,” Clarke thinks out loud, squeezing through the tight gap between a four-wheel drive and a mini. Raven places her hand on her back, guiding her along the space.

“Apparently Bellamy’s vote outweighed all of ours. He was the one taking it after all,”

Hearing his name spoken out loud, Clarke winces.

“God, we really can’t talk about anything else, can we?”

“I guess not,” Octavia shrugs, not really sounding apologetic in the slightest.

“You ever been in love, O?” Clarke wonders, hoping the segue isn’t too obvious because she _is_ genuinely curious… it just might be a convenient time to ask. When Octavia shoots her a look, she feels the need to explain herself. “You said Bell had to give the big brother talk more times than you could count… I was just thinking,”

Octavia rolls her eyes and smiles widely, clearly thinking about her idiot brother.

“Yeah but Bell loved giving that talk. He’d do it at any chance he could: when another guy so much as looked at me he’d jump on them as soon as possible. We got banned from the T because he almost shoved someone into the tracks once, for slapping my ass,”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Clarke tries to smile at the anecdote, but it’d take more energy than she has right now, so she settles for a shrug and keeps walking forward.

“Once,” Octavia gives in. “His name was Ilian,”

Raven makes a sound, a little like a snort from behind them.

“Is it cliché that we’ve all got one love of our life?”

“Not you,” Clarke turns to say, brow furrowing painfully. “You’ve had two,”

It was never a secret that Clarke was the other woman, that Raven had been with him for longer, that she’d been much more invested than Clarke had been able to get to.

“Yeah but Finn doesn’t count,”

“Why not? You were in love, weren’t you?”

“Yeah but…” she trails off, searching to grasp the words and it’s not like her tone is dead, she just sounds like she’s reciting facts from an encyclopedia. She’s got the emotions trapped in a box somewhere at the top of her head; that’s just how she deals with conversations like this. That’s how Clarke used to deal with conversations like this. That is, until Bellamy.

“I’d die for Wells. I never would have died for Finn,”

It’s odd, Clarke thinks, to define love in that way. Maybe that’s just because of where they are now, who they’ve had to become. She’d like to know if that’s how Raven would have explained it this time last year. Octavia seems to have the same idea, more or less.

“I never thought like that with Ilian. Never had to. He was just a guy who made me happy, who made the time to take care of me. That was all I needed back in Boston. There was no life or death about any of it,”

“It sucks that that’s what love is now,” Raven sighs, and Clarke can’t stop herself from saying, as plain as day:

“That is not what love is. Not at all,” because it isn’t, and it’ll never be all love is. She realized she’d die for Bellamy so so long ago, she’d die for any of them. Love is more than that.

“I forgot who we were talking to,” the ponytailed brunette rolls her eyes, but it’s the first time she’s smiled at Clarke in a while and she’ll take that.

“So, what was he like?” Clarke asks, turning to Octavia to learn some more.

“He was sweet. Knew what he had; you know? He never took me and him for granted,”

Raven snorts again.

“That was pretty rare,”

“Why did things end?”

“He got a job offer from some fancy company in England. He asked me to go out there with him, but it wasn’t the right move for me and it wouldn’t have lasted long distance. My sex drive was way too high,” O shrugs.

“He didn’t want to stay?”

Clarke finds it difficult to believe he wouldn’t have wanted to make it work, even if she knows barely anything about the guy. Octavia doesn’t sound like she’s convinced herself of romance, not in this story. She talks about this and oozes honestly, seeps realism.

“He was pretty torn up about the whole thing, but we were young and it wasn’t the time to put a relationship over a once in a lifetime job… I’d love to know if he made it out,” she hums, not sadly, just wondering.

“You should look for him,” Clarke tells her. “You’ll have the time when you get to Vancouver,”

She says it hopefully, thinking Octavia would jump at the chance to find him again. She’s surprised when the girl lets out a heavy sigh, and sucks in a sharp breath before she answers.

“Truth is, I’m not the person I was back then. I don’t know how I love anymore,”

“This really has fucked with us, hasn’t it?” Raven mumbles, kicking something from behind them.

Clarke scoffs, spins around and braces her friend with a bit of a dubious look.

“You’re telling me,” she says, trying to be playful even if she’s swaying on the spot.

“Yeah,” Raven smiles sadly, head ducking. “Sorry,”

“You know, I was so angry when you guys decided to tag along with us,” Clarke carries on walking, nodding at O casually. “I hated that I was being forced to trust you, like really really hated it. I knew I would have liked you in the old days, but there wasn’t any time for that, for being friends with someone you don’t really know. And I hated Bellamy. He got under my skin like no one ever has, but I can’t even remember why anymore. I just remember that pure boiling feeling in my blood whenever I used to look at that dumb smirk.

But now, I guess I’m just angry that I didn’t trust you the second I met you. I feel like I’ve wasted so much time,”

“You haven’t wasted a second, you know that right?” Raven mumbles, softly. “Not a second.”

That’s easy for her to say though. Her and Murphy actually made it to a point where they could make out obnoxiously against trees.

“Yeah… it’s just a feeli-”

She doesn’t get to finish her sentence. Her stomach has had enough, and her legs have bucked outwards, unable to take her weight any longer. It takes a couple moments to get rid of the flash of lightening in her vision but she waits out the blindness, crawling around on the floor and trying to grasp for anything that might stop her from heaving.

It doesn’t help, and she’s throwing up everything and nothing all over again. When her elbows lock, they give out too and she faceplants the gravel, grains of concrete lodging themselves into her healing cuts.

“Clarke!”

“I’m fine,” she chokes out. Knowing that she’s not going to be able to pull herself back up just yet, Clarke settles for rolling on to her back, panting up to clouds that roll over the sky oddly quickly, travelling south away from them. “I’m fine. Let’s just, let’s just get to the hospital,”

Clarke swings her heavy arm over her chest, so that she can cradle it and protect it from falling off or something. It doesn’t even feel like a part of her body anymore. It’s not a limb, because her blood must have stopped flowing to it and the skin is probably more dead than alive.

“For God’s sake, will you just let me carry you?” Raven snaps as she hovers over Clarke, landing into her tunneled line of sight.

“I’m fine,” Clarke hums, breathes out coolly then tries to sound a little more confident on the next one. “I’m fine.”

“You’re slowing us down,”

Smart. She’s always been smart, is all Clarke can bear to think. She knows how to get what she wants.

“No I’m not,” she wheezes out. “I can get there.”

There is a hand on her throat, two fingers held light against a point of her jaw.

“Shit Clarke, listen to your pulse,”

That’s normal, she wants to say. That’s normally what happens in the last stages. Her heart will go berserk and her lungs won’t be able to keep up with the blood rush. She doesn’t have to hold any of her pulse points to know that it’s probably not healthy, she can hear it drum its way through her whole body.

“I can hear it. It doesn’t sound steady, does it?”

“Come on,” Octavia’s voice hums across her, a palm patting her waist softly. “Come on, Clarke, you promised us a couple more days. You gave us some more time,”

The realization hits her like a truck and despite everything, Clarke has to choke out a laugh, more of a bark.

“This is why you asked for me to hold on?”

She gestures somewhere, she doesn’t really know where specifically, but she hopes she might be pointing in the direction of the hospital, vaguely.

“Come on,” Raven hits her side, prods it gently as a way of getting Clarke to move. “We’re gonna keep moving,”

“Okay, okay let me just catch my breath,”

“We should have let Bellamy stay,”

It is hissed from somewhere above her, definitely not meant for her ears but the song of his name rings deep into Clarke’s clouded head and she closes her eyes to focus more into hearing.

“Shut it. We don’t need to talk like that,”

“Raven if she dies without him… he’s going to break, like really seriously break,”

“She’s not going to die,” Raven mutters, more to herself than for anyone else. How can she still be this naïve? Can she not see how pathetic Clarke is being right now?

“We should have told him to stay. He’d know what to do. She wouldn’t fight him,”

“I would,” Clarke rasps, her chest rising oddly high.

“Clarke,” Raven groans but the half-conscious blonde is already waving her arm in the air, batting away all of the smothering and she lifts herself up to sit.

“Yeah, it’s good. I’m good. I’ve got it. Few deep breaths and I’ll be fine,”

She makes a show of sucking the air in as much as she can, the oxygen flooding through but not quite reaching a point where she could say it’s enough.

“We should just stop for a break,” Octavia says when Clarke’s breathing gives out again, and she has to resort to the shallow, pathetic puffs of air. “We’ve got time,”

“No we don’t,” Clarke manages. “We can’t stop; we need to get to him,”

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

Raven is reaching up to Clarke’s forehead curiously, probably just looking for any kind of distraction. Clarke follows her finger and lifts her good hand up to her hairline, hoping and praying that she hasn’t started bleeding from her face again. She could do without worrying about that too.

Her nail comes up to tap at something plastic, something cheap and tinny to the touch, and she has to give it a good yank from where it has embedded itself in her head, to get it out.

“Is that the crown we found in that supermarket?”

Yeah, Clarke smiles. It is. Well, she is only wearing half of it. And it’s not her half because Clarke remembers taking the right side, specifically because it wouldn’t get in the way of her bow. The idiot must have swapped them around, must have found hers when they were dealing her stuff out from her pack. So he must have her piece if she’s got his.

“Half,” Clarke mumbles, knowing it won’t make any sense to her friend. But Bellamy didn’t leave it so that Raven would understand the joke. She doesn’t know why he left it, but that sure wasn’t why.

“Why the hell did you hang on to it?”

Because it means something. The shitty toy is a memory of the day they reluctantly accepted each other as being something more than… fellow escapees. The day they became friends.

“I don’t know,” she lies.

 

…

 

“Can you stand up?”

“Sure,”

It turns out, Clarke can’t. She can’t even push herself on to her knees, all she can do is lay there and wait for the weight at the base of her stomach to stop dragging her against the concrete.

“Wait,” she mumbles, squirming to get the feeling back to her feet.

“This is ridiculous,”

“You aren’t helping,”

“Well, what can I do to help then?” Raven snaps impatiently. “Because you aren’t letting us help you at all,”

“You are helping,” Clarke rolls her eyes. Can’t they see that they’re delaying a search for their own safety in favor of the smallest chance that they might be able to find her something to buy a couple more days.

“Just, just give me a minute,”

Maybe if she waits for the numbing to subside, her efforts might be a little more fruitful.

“How much is there between us?” she asks, not bothering to organize her thoughts and hoping the two of them will just pick up on whatever she’s trying to say.

“They left about an hour before we did, but they were running so…” Octavia answers her.

“Murphy was running?”

“I know, I can hardly believe it,”

“How far is the hospital?”

“A few miles. They might be there by now,”

“Then we need to move,” Clarke guesses, her face scrunching up as she prepares for the pain again. It’s strange how a wound as simple as a scratch to her palm can be so agonizing, can cause this much collateral damage. Can tear down every last defense in every part of her body.

She manages to pull herself into a crouching position, the tips of the fingers on her injured hand leaning like pins against the concrete as a brace.

“Okay I won’t carry you,” Raven says once Octavia has rolled away to lead them forward, and she shuffles forward with an arm stretched out. “But at least let me take some of the weight away,”

“Yeah,” Clarke sighs back, knowing she’s going to have to compromise if they have any chance of catching up with the others. “Yeah, okay,”

“Here,”

Raven’s arm drifts closer, looping smoothly under Clarke’s shoulder and giving her the last tug that she needs in order to raise herself to her full height, to stand up straight without her back giving out.

“Thanks,”

She doesn’t get an answer because Raven is too preoccupied with making Clarke’s boot move forward. It seems to have grown a mind of its own, having become tired of the rest of her body not being able to communicate to it.

“That’s it,” the brunette mumbles when Clarke manages a small step.

“I feel like one of your robots,”

“No,” Raven barks a laugh surprisingly and looks to Clarke with wide eyes. “Those actually worked.”

“Just the vote of confidence I needed,”

“Sorry Griffin. Can’t lie,”

Clarke musters the little smile that she can when she hears Raven’s remark, laced with familiarity. She turns her head forward, hand pushing off of the car that she’d been slumped against and when her eyes land to the road stretching out before them, she thinks she can just make out the hazy and lumped skyline of a city.

“That it?” she asks, craning to gauge the size of it. It looks manageable, like they won’t have to look too long for the hospital, but big enough for her to know that they aren’t going to make it through without encountering at least some sort of attack.

“Yeah, that’s it,”

“Octavia!” Clarke calls when the girl drifts a little too far for comfort, probably not having realized that her and Raven aren’t going to be able to cover ground at even half her pace. “Wait up,”

She barely slows down, but Clarke understands why. With the city in sights, Bellamy is just within their grasp once more. It’s up to her to make it to him before her mind goes blank.

 

…

 

Clarke really wishes she has all her wits about her when they approach the road that transitions them from highway to city lanes, because this place is foreign to an extent her fuzzy brain can’t quite comprehend.

Her eyelids are hooded over, and have been for the rest of the journey, tired from the effort of having to resist lolling her head on to Raven’s open shoulder.

It’d be so easy to just… sleep now. Her whole body is calling for something stronger than rest, something more permanent, something lasting. Hold on, Clarke, she tells herself. The only thing propelling her forward is the pole of a magnet in her chest, searching for its counterpart blindly. His smell is still drifting all around her, encompassing her in something very similar to a cloud, making Clarke feel like she’s floating above the ground, only getting higher and higher and higher.

“You still with me?” Raven prods when they slump against the first building they cross in their path.

Clarke knows she’s going to have to tear herself away from her friend now that they’ve got to navigate their way through this labyrinth. Both Raven and Octavia are going to need all hands on deck, all focus streaming into the aims of their guns.

Part of her hopes that when Raven lets go of her, she just collapses back down to the ground because at least she knows what that feels like. It was nicer than this. It sure hurt a whole lot less.

But of course, Clarke can’t remember a time when her body actually worked along with her intentions, and her knees lock straight when her support falls away.

“You good?” Raven prompts again, a little more urgently as Clarke has favored squinting her eyes closed over responding.

“How am I supposed to answer that?” she questions, coughing away the scratchiness within her throat unsuccessfully.

“It’s okay. We’re almost there,”

“Hey Raven!” Octavia calls from a few feet away, head turning for only a second. Raven hovers for a moment, eyes Clarke cautiously in case she topples over, but that’s all she can spare considering where they are, and she crosses the gap to huddle over with O.

Clarke shuffles the small amount of distance that she can bear, craning to hear the plan of action because she’s desperate for a distraction.

“They didn’t cross us on the highway,” Octavia whispers harshly, no time to make her voice sound cordial. “What does that mean?”

That was the deal, wasn’t it? If they made it out before the three of them got to the city, then Bellamy and Murphy were going to double-back on themselves to meet them somewhere in the middle. But they never did get back.

“It means we have to find the hospital ourselves. That was what we agreed,”

“You think they didn’t…”

Octavia can’t finish her sentence because her voice cracks out.

“We can’t think about that right now, O. Making assumptions is just going to complicate things. We focus on the problems that we know we can help,”

Great, Clarke thinks. That’s what she is now, she supposes. She’s a problem.

“But if they even made it in, then they haven’t made it out, so surely that means we won’t be walking into an empty building? What are we going to do with Clarke?”

If Clarke had the ability to do anything other than breathe, hold herself up, and speak the odd sentence, then she’d raise an argument about how they’re talking like she’s not here. But she may as well be passed out, because it’s not like she’s any more help than what she would have been like that.

“We can’t split up. There’s only three of us and one of us on our own is never going to end well,”

Octavia tosses her head back, nods at Clarke.

“You gonna be alright looking after yourself?”

How can she even ask that? Clarke hasn’t been able to hold herself up for more than a couple hours for days. She tries to say yes but her throat starts burning too much for words, so she settles for a brief nod and hopes the lie isn’t too obvious.

“Just a bit longer, Clarke,”

She nods again, because that’s all she can do.

“Stay between us, right? We’ll keep you safe, but you’ll have to stay in the middle,”

Clarke shuffles forward, feeling an awful lot like a marionette puppet, and settles behind Octavia, just in front of Raven.

“Do you need a gun?” Raven asks quietly and Clarke decides to shake her head this time. Even if she had one, it’s not like she’d be of any use with it. Not like this.

They move, slowly but surely, across the outskirts of the forgotten town. If Raven catches sight of the building that they’re looking for then the pounding in Clarke’s ears drowns it out.

Every time she catches herself fading, Clarke pictures hands. Hands big enough to make her feel like she is being held all over. She pictures dark eyelashes that flutter heavily closed each time she’d breathe coolly over his face. She hears a rumble, that same seismic, damaging chuckle.

When the first eruption of Octavia’s pistol rings out across the town enraptured in white noise, Clarke smells fire and noses into his layers to smell it some more. She tastes thunder, the kind that cried for honey crisped by crystals at his lips.

When groans that have guided her through endless nightmares start to grow, Clarke blocks out everything but the way he would tumble her name from his lips like he never had the time to cherish it.

When the gunfire intensifies, when Octavia and Raven start to shout orders to each other, caught up in the action of staying alive, Clarke thinks back to how he kissed her neck, how he whispered silence into it with each movement.

When one of the girls cries out, screaming the name of a man who has only one… like Adele, like Cher, Clarke trudges and stumbles and relishes in her love because doing anything else feels like shining a laser through the back of her eyes.

No, thinking of Bellamy is different to everything else. The memories she can claw back from her dying brain are warm, and dim, and flickering like the wilting flame of a candle. It’s so much calmer than the beams that pierce her everything. It’s a comfort, it’s a homing beacon.

It tells her that when she needs to let go, the candle is small enough to hide, the candle won’t die too. It tells her that the wick will burn down until gushing winds extinguish it, not when she blows it out.

She falls over when Octavia’s hand is in the air, finger raised, and Clarke can’t help but be reminded of ET. Maybe Octavia is pointing to her home too. It should be harder to pull herself up, and the sound she makes when her feet land back solid is more of a cry for help, but there are bodies being thrown all around her and Clarke has never liked the color purple. Veins popping out at her like they want to share their blood.

There are big swinging doors, there are bullets firing in undying succession. There is something barreling through her brain, crawling up her arm and Clarke likes the sound of Octavia’s voice.

It’s always so light, so easy. Even now, as she shouts out directions and warnings and calls for assistance, Clarke would have guessed that she’s not worried at all. Fighting is where she belongs, fighting flows through her like she was born to do it. When Octavia Blake is fighting, she is certain and practical and the whole world simplifies itself below her punches.

Ground doesn’t feel like ground too much. Boots don’t belong on floors like these. Tiles might be crunching beneath her feet but if she’s running then her body is going to need something to push off of.

Clarke wonders how either of the girls have any ammunition left, wonders if their sheer willpower has been generating bullets from thin air.

Her name is called when her head starts to careen towards to the ground, her back leaning forward as gravity starts to claim her again. She has to swerve her shoulder to stop from falling, and the movement sends her twirling across the corridor, the momentum resonating.

Feet are storming, stairs are climbing, masses of dead flesh are ascending with aggression that makes Clarke hold her chin a little higher.

She almost trips over something that has been left on the cluttered floor, shaped long and thin like a pencil. There’s crap everywhere though, and if Clarke registers the object with familiarity, it might just be because there was a time in her life where she practically lived in a hospital.

There is a different lobby after they make it through a fire door, and the running must stop so that they can do something that involves a door off its hinges a few yards down, and the metal handles currently being drawn together. Barricade. Good plan.

And then there is another one, only visible as it is tucked into the corner between the wall and the ground, but Clarke is leaning with both sets of fingers gripping to her thighs, hunched over like she’s preparing to throw up.

She doesn’t throw up. She coughs, she chokes, and blood pours out from her mouth in spotted clumps.

And there is an arrow in the empty corridor, elegant and black and hers.

“Raven,” she gasps, voice rasping and soaking wet, clogged with the gunk coming from wherever her organs have faltered. She recognizes her own finger in front of her face, and it is shaking as she directs it to the corner.

Octavia has her back pressed tight to the crack between the double doors, chest heaving and lurching each time a particularly strong push against the other side is given.

When Raven disregards her pointed fist, instead choosing to rush over to Clarke and restore her up to standing, Clarke breathes heavily, unsure if she is sighing or if this is just the desperate need for air coming from her lungs.

Tearing herself away from Raven’s grasp is too much of endeavor for her body to be able to cope with. She knows she’s going to collide with the cold tiles as soon as she leaves Raven’s bubble; it’s just a matter of how close she can get to her arrow before that happens.

A trip. Another stumble. A pant when she remembers to breathe. And she’s down on the ground, crouched over the pointed weapon and clutching to it like it’s him. Like it’s his arm, his shoulder, his neck, his heart.

She breathes in. No wait, that’s not the right word. The way she inhales is too ragged and too deep to just be a breath. She drinks in the stale air around her, needs to drown herself in it.

People land either side of Clarke and try to pry her hands away from the arrow but it’s not theirs and she’s not going to give it away.

When the oxygen dissipates in her throat, never reaching her lungs, Clarke groans as loud as her voice will take her and raises the tight fist around the arrow so that she can smash it back into the ground. Her knuckles crack beneath the force of which she punches and the arrow snaps in two pathetically.

She wheezes, sounding like a waterlogged and broken toy.

“He’s here,”

She twists the two halves of her arrow between her fingers, getting a feel for the light metallic pipe. She scratches her chipped nail over it, needing the discomforting grind of two materials that should never touch.

“That way,”

Thinking that she has just nodded her head in the direction of the arrowhead, Clarke grimaces and rolls on to the balls of her feet. She spits away from the two of them, watches stringing blood catapult its way through the air.

Neither of them say anything. With the doors holding up, barely, they all know that they have to keep running. Plus, just because they’ve temporarily blocked out the oncoming horde from outside, there could be any number of walkers within the hospital itself.

If Bellamy and Murphy are still here, if they’ve had to wait to leave, then the chances are they aren’t alone.

She can hear her own heart in her ears, doesn’t like the way it won’t pause for breath.

Is that an arm under her shoulder? Maybe it is. Maybe she’s being tugged along the corridor in the direction of the cracked arrow. Maybe she’s dreaming. Maybe she’s dying. Maybe she’s already dead.

No, not yet. Not right now.

Vision swirling into focus, Clarke refuses to lean too heavily on to Raven’s arm because while she’s still got a skeleton that can move, it’s her job to support it.

Octavia finds another arrow when they reach a crossroads, pointing in the direction of another staircase. Clever boy, Clarke thinks. Clever, clever boy.

The stairs move beneath her feet, eerily quiet as they jumble and rearrange themselves into an identical structure. A spiraled staircase only in her mind.

Another arrow. Another climb. Another hour stretching into forever and Clarke is clinging to her life as it is being pulled away from her.

There is a sound from a way off, not far enough for them to be safe. Not far enough away for it to not have seen them. Raven swings her head to look above and below the squared layers of flights, trying to gauge how much distance they have between them and the incoming attack.

The noise sounds like it is coming from above them, barreling downwards. Clarke tries to apologize, because it is surely her winded, sporadic puffs of air that have drawn it to them.

She does, she goes to say it, figures out how the word ‘sorry’ can form on her tongue but there is another noise that cuts her off. A louder noise. A more sudden noise. A noise that stops the other from streaming through the enclosed space.

It is gunfire, it is a bullet lodging into its target and Clarke isn’t standing on steps anymore.

Floors above, floors and floors and floors above where they are and at an angle that she can be certain it wasn’t either of the girls on her side.

Maybe what she does next is foolish. No, it is definitely foolish. And yet she does it anyway because she hasn’t got her feet on solid ground and she knows she won’t ever again.

“Bellamy!” she rasps, hoping it’s loud enough for the shooter, the stretch of a mountain away from her, to hear.

A hand latches to the corner of her mouth. Raven’s to silence her. Octavia is moving hurriedly around the two of them, probably dithering between running to her brother now that she knows he’s alive and needing to stay with Clarke.

Go, Clarke wants to say. Keep him going. Let him take care of you, let him smother you, let him love you with that heart too big for this ruin.

But there is thunder.

“Clarke? Clarke!”

Is that her name? It sounds like more than a name when he says it. But that’s him. That is Bellamy and she knows where he is now.

She tries to call back, but Raven’s palm is a vice around her clamped lips, all three of them clinging to the barrier like they’re getting ready to jump over it.

The wrist with her crawling blood spider has a finger latch around it and then stairs are moving under her stilled feet and she is getting closer to him. Bellamy doesn’t seem to have a problem with the shouting, because he is calling for her and he’s probably said her name a hundred times within the last five seconds.

He says other things too.

“Let me through, Murphy!” sticks out like a sore thumb to Clarke’s blown ears.

She is still being elevated up, someone on each arm because she really has just turned into a puppet. The ceiling above is threatening to cave itself in. There are drums embedded within the plaster of it, that rattle in different spots. It’d be rhythmic if each stair above was being hit, but whoever is playing them is skipping them out, three at a time.

Still moving up, still wheezing with deflated lungs threatening to give out at any point now, Clarke traces the way the leaning floor above her is being pounded against so hard that dust has started to spring from the peeling paint.

And then another gunshot rings out because Octavia has caught sight of something behind the door of the next level, and Clarke is still being tugged upwards.

And he calls her name. He’s so close. So close that she can hear every intrinsic emotion within that ragged, beautiful voice. When Raven reluctantly slides her hand away from Clarke’s lips, she takes with it a stained red mark on the flat of her palm. Yeah, the bleeding isn’t going to stop.

Someone shoots another gun from higher up. Octavia shoots again. Something cries out at the bottom of the staircase and Clarke is at least aware enough to know that the barricade has fallen.

Once Octavia has finished firing on the level landing, they tear up another flight and Clarke can’t see anything because, although it may have been daylight outside, the few windows of this alley have moldered and dirtied, having had no maintenance for months.

So, the figure at the top of the stairs shouldn’t cast the shadow that it does, because really, there isn’t light here. Maybe it’s just her delusion, and yet she can see the broad muscle, the torn up curls, the tightened jaw as plain as day.

With the top of this flight blocked off, Raven seems to stop the three of them from rising any further. She lets go of Clarke, makes sure she isn’t going to tumble down the stairs, then swings over the banister to aim for the leaders of the walking dead.

Octavia makes a sound, a gasp, but that door behind them swings open again and she rushes to take care of the howling zombie, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Clarke is left, in the center of this wall of steps, and she wants to help them too, but she is defenseless and once she has laid eyes on him, there is nothing else in the world to look at.

He’s here. He’s alive. He hasn’t stopped for more than a few milliseconds before he is tearing himself down to meet her. But Clarke doesn’t need to hold on anymore. Bellamy is okay and that’s all she needs.

Time to let go.

Her body seems to finally separate itself from her consciousness, because she is leaning back before she knows what is happening. It doesn’t matter how quickly, how desperately Bellamy is running towards her, how determinedly he’s calling her name, Clarke can’t stop herself from falling now.

Her lungs weighted like stones are what tip her over completely, and the first collision her shoulders make to the stairs that she’s already climbed create instant bruises. Bruises that are going to be purple and green when someone assesses her corpse, if someone every gets the chance to assess her corpse. Maybe she’ll just become another body in this globe of bodies, there’s something comforting in that.

Her arm seems to reach for him, and maybe she’s just convincing herself that their fingers touch before she falls, because the tingling between the charged skin is too much of a relief for her dying body.

“Clarke!” tears through the space between them and Bellamy sounds more than desperate.

Her head hits something sharp, something that makes that harsh, flashing, white light lurch forward to the forefront of her vision. They should really make the edges of these stairs a little more blunt. This is a hazard, she thinks.

It’s not the first time that a part of her has been sliced in two; she’s got scars all over her face that are perfect examples of that. There is a gaping wound on her hand that relentlessly seeps no matter how much she has tried to block it off.

The amount of blood that is pouring from her head seems to make her slip, driving her down under unyielding gravity and she keeps tumbling, keeps falling, feet flying and soaring over her shoulders.

She’s never felt pain like this. She’s never been this cold, this absorbed in mind-numbing agony. Time to let go.

The return of level ground halts the collapse, and Clarke knows that she has landed with her back flat against the floor. There is a shoe by her head, an unlaced trainer and then a body over her stomach. Death is all she can smell, but this isn’t how she’s supposed to die. Not after all of this hurting, she can’t let herself get eaten.

The face of a smiling walker, that malicious and blood-curdling grin, imprints itself into her eyes and stops Clarke from seeing stars. But it is gone within the next moment and instead, there is a hand catching the crimson waterfall at her skull. Those hands that can hold the weight of the world twice over.

If the edges of her bloodied lips start to turn themselves up, it’s of their own volition.

“Hey Bell,” she whispers even if she can’t see him. She doesn’t need to see him to know that he’s the one holding her.

The fingers at the gushing cut on her head are trembling, shaking because maybe he’s just as cold as she is.

There’s a lot more shouting going on around her. There are orders thrown all across, commands made in the heat of it all and Clarke would have loved to have been able to help but at least they won’t have to compromise for her now. It’s okay that she’s leaving. Less mouths to feed, less people to carry.

“Don’t-” his voice is stuttered, wrecked and familiar. He’s ignoring everything else around them too. “Don’t you dare.”

She doesn’t know what he’s referring to. Right now, Clarke doesn’t really care. She just wants him to hold her.

Humming softly, Clarke starts to remember the song her father would sing to her as a kid to get her to sleep.

“Clarke!”

“Hey Bell,”

She doesn’t know if she’s already said that, but it’s good to see him.

There is a shout and Bellamy might look towards it. It sounds an awful lot like Octavia and it’s calling for the two of them. She still can’t see him. There is just one arm around her waist, another at the back of her head, probably soaked to the bone with her blood.

She focuses on how the blood is streaming, how it’s rushing down the back of her neck and pouring into his clothes.

“Okay, okay Clarke, we’re gonna move higher, okay? Hold on there for me, we’re just gonna get you somewhere safer,” he coos, and she can tell he’s trying to drain his voice of emotion but it’s not really working. It would sound like a completely different person if it were anyone else speaking. His tone completely different to how it was when he was shouting.

“You’re here,” is all Clarke can breathe back.

“Yeah, yeah I’m here for you. I’ve got you,”

As he says it, Bellamy moves the arm that had been wrapped over her body all the way under her, cradling her to his chest and while he tries to keep his fingers at the wound- probably just as fatal as her infection- his palm shifts down to cup her neck.

“I’ve got you,” he repeats and then the ground is gone again and the only thing anchoring her to the Earth is his arms. She rolls her head around, pushes her face into his chest as he carries her up the stairs. She doesn’t want to see the dark wine of her blood all over the sharp tiles. So she pushes, and pushes against his ribcage, and if she lets out a sob at the throbbing of her skull then she can’t hear it.

Surprisingly, Bellamy doesn’t fall in the slip and slide that she’s managed to create, and she thinks they reach the top of this flight, and the top of the next one, and a few more because it lasts forever. Bullets are still being fired in every direction. People are still shouting their warnings. Murphy might be there, but she wishes he was somewhere safer. This mustn’t be easy with only one arm.

After days and days of this, Clarke wouldn’t have thought that her eventual cause of death is going to be a head wound. Whichever kills her first; it’s like they’re all rushing to see which can be the one to end her life.

Bellamy might be mumbling things down to her, but they fall on dead ears.

Clarke just wants to sleep. She just wants to have all of this be over. They were all so wrong, so wrong because she is not strong. She’s weak and she’s lost, and she can’t keep going, as much as they all think she can.

The next time Clarke can even so much as open her eyes, the room she’s in feels like it’s a janitor’s closet. They must be hiding out, but the room isn’t big enough for the five of them and the door is only going to hold up for so long.

Her and Bellamy aren’t alone, but they might as well be because he is all she can know. Calls are being made about where to find… something. Med- med- medicine? Is that what they’re saying? Are they still trying to save her?

They need to understand that she is a lost cause.

“Oh my God,” Poor Bellamy. She didn’t want to hurt him, she really didn’t. “Oh my God. Raven you have to help me I don’t know what to do. I need, you’ve got to get something for the blood, and I’ll try to-”

“Bellamy,” Raven’s voice is sympathetic, but there’s a finality to it. There’s an acceptance.

“She hit her head when she fell. God, Raven there’s blood all over that fucking staircase,”

There are shaking hands at Clarke’s scalp. He’s being too loud, she thinks. Has he always been able to shout this loudly? No one is gonna hear you, Bell. No one.

“She’s not breathing properly, I can’t help. I can’t fix it, please Raven I don’t know…”

Something spongey comes to rest at the sting on her head and it inflates instantly with the flow of her blood, catching it and doing only that. Nothing is going to stop this bleeding.

“Clarke?” Raven’s voice rings through her but it is futile. There is that light in the back of her eyes, brilliant and pulsing, calling for her now. She wants to fall into it.

“Time to let go,”

She doesn’t mean to say it out loud, but her mouth isn’t really hers anymore. She hums it, wants them to know that she’s content with this. Wants them to know that she’ll do anything to get rid of this pain.

“No!”

Ouch, Bellamy screams horrifically when he wants to. He probably sees her flinch but that doesn’t make him get any quieter.

“Stay, Clarke. Please, please just stay,”

He did this once, she thinks. Surely a school bus was involved… or did she dream that? No, he whispered for her to stay just like he’s doing now. This is different though. There was hope back there. She wasn’t done back there.

“Wish I could,” she tells him and tries to look at him but maybe her eyes aren’t hers anymore either.

“No, no, you can. You can,”

If she doesn’t die soon, then they’re all just going to keep fighting for her life. They need to look after themselves now.

Clarke tries to figure out where his hands are, and it takes him digging his nails into her flesh for her to find them. One still wrapped over her, pulling her into him, and the other cradling her neck, squeezing at her shoulder to give her some kind of feeling.

When she finally gets to lay eyes on him, it’s because he has tugged her head to look at him, brought his own so close to hers that his forehead ends up crashing into hers. She stares at his face. Clarke learns it. She keeps her head on his because maybe that way he’ll hear how much she needs this.

“Hey Bell,” she smiles weakly.

“Hey Princess,” his voice is different now. Not as desperate, but she knows he’s on the edge of that. There’s still panic in each word, but there’s a delicacy too. He knows how fragile she’s become. He’s rushing the words, but something in it tells her that he’s trying not to.

“I’m glad,” she starts, and she tries to lift her good hand to his face. It must work because there it is, resting just lightly on his cheek. Her thumb doesn’t look like her thumb as it caresses and smooths over all of the creases it can reach. “I’m glad I got to see you again.”

“Yeah, I’m here,”

“You weren’t though. You left,”

It doesn’t matter if this is sapping the last of her strength, she doesn’t mind using it for that.

“Raven, could you go watch the door?” he asks, not tearing his eyes away from Clarke’s which she’s glad about because she knows that the second he does, there’s going to be nothing left.

Raven must hesitate, she must open her mouth to argue that she wants to stay, but once she’s sucked in a wet breath, she must see something between Clarke and Bellamy. She must see how tightly they are clinging to each other. She must know that he is all that is keeping Clarke alive now.

“Yeah,”

Clarke would say goodbye to Raven if she could. She wants to apologize for not being able to last through all of this. But Raven knows all of that, she’s always known Clarke well enough that they don’t need words.

She goes to open her mouth, to say anything to anyone but then she remembers how hard it is to breathe and any words are replaced hurriedly by a panicked gasp.

“Hey, hey,” Bellamy says urgently, and she realizes she’s squeezing a little too hard on to his face. “Hey, look at me,”

Clarke already is looking at him, but maybe that’s not what he’s asking of her. And that’s all it takes for her vision to focus again, for the clouds to dissipate at least for a moment.

“You’re okay,” he chokes out, hand shifting to get her more comfortable, running all over her body like he can’t figure out where to touch. He doesn’t know that there isn’t a way to hold her where the pain won’t reach her, he just needs to be here. He is what she wants to see when the light takes over. Clarke rubs her thumb under his eyes, massaging out the heaviness.

He is kneeling, like he’s getting ready to pray, and her back is resting on top of his thighs, secure enough that he takes his hand from the divot in her waist and keeps the other one tightly cupping her neck.

“You’re okay,”

It turns into more than a reassurance, and Clarke tries to focus on where he has decided to take his palm. It drifts up the side of her body, tingles in a burning path, and falls to rest at the edge of her jaw, fingers running along it like he’s looking for a pulse. It’s too fast, she thinks, you won’t be able to catch it.

Being held like this makes it easier for Clarke to crane her head against his, and all she can do is marvel at his face. Even if it looks sadder than anything she’s ever seen before.

“You’re so beautiful,” she whispers when the pad of her thumb ghosts over his eyelids and forces him to squeeze his eyes shut just for a moment. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”

He breathes in raggedly. She knows she’s making this harder, but he never let her say goodbye before and if she’s going to die in his arms then she’s going to die having said everything she wants to say.

His eyes are still flickering gently but ravenously over Clarke’s face. She doesn’t want to admit to herself that he’s starting to well up. If he cries then she’s definitely going to cry, and they both need to do better than that. There’s too much to say in so little time. Too much to say to make room for tears.

“I’m so proud of you Bellamy,” she tells him, because as much as she wanted him with her today, and as futile as the trip to this hospital is, he proved Murphy and Raven so wrong. He made the most unselfish decision he could have; he left Clarke and fought to get her help. “You did the right thing,”

“What can I do?” he pleads, voice nothing more than a cracked whisper. He pushes even closer into her, probably guessing that if their skin touches hard enough, he might be able to give her some of his life.

“Just,” she lets her hand fall back to his cheek, holds it perfectly. “Just be with me,”

“Hey,” he says again when she splutters and careens for some oxygen, looking like a fish out of water. “I’m here. I’m going to stay with you, Clarke,”

He sounds so ruined, so broken that the words don’t make sense on his tongue. His fingers rise up her face and trace their way all across it; maybe he’s trying to learn her just as much as she is learning him. He’s got a black eye, she thinks, one that definitely wasn’t there yesterday. And there is a bloodied cut on his lip, like he’s been in a fist fight. If they had the time she’d ask what happened, but she can’t.

“I’ve got you,”

It doesn’t matter how promising his words are, Clarke knows that he is nowhere close to being okay. And she needs to change that before she dies.

“Bellamy listen to me,” she musters, and they are both gripping at each other’s cheeks, mirroring the other one flawlessly. Of course his eyes meet hers, they were already trained and burning into her before she even had to ask. “You’re going to be alright.”

She ignores Bellamy’s scoff because there is no humor in it and Clarke doesn’t want him to not be happy.

“You’re going to get to Vancouver and you’re going to look after our family and you’re going to make me proud. I know you are. We’re both… we’re both just going home,”

In a way, she’s right. She’s going to get to see her parents again, in some form surely. And he’s going to get his sister to his mother.

But Bellamy doesn’t seem to think so because he shakes his head fervently, and the momentum of that causes Clarke’s to shudder.

“No,” he demands. That’s definitely what it is. He is demanding that she listen to him, that she believe him. “We’re already home. You and me Clarke, you and me,”

Her head feels so much lighter than it did earlier today. It feels like nothing.

“You and me, _this_ is home,”

She doesn’t argue with that. There is nothing valid she can use to counter it.

“You have made me so happy,” is what she settles on, knowing time is still ticking and chaos is still erupting outside. She has no idea where Raven is but then again she has no idea about anything at all. His eyes slam closed as she says it and Bellamy’s head falls limp in her hand. She’ll hold him up if he needs it. If this is all too much then she’ll support him through it, but she can’t keep it in. If she doesn’t say it now, she’ll never get to say it at all. “So, so happy Bellamy,”

“Clarke,” he begs, lips torn apart and eyelids creased painfully shut.

“You’ve made all of this worth it. I’m just… I’m just glad that you were the one I got to spend the rest of my life with,”

“It’s not fair,” Bellamy mumbles it against her palm, his head turning to hide in her grasp, but his eyes stay on hers.

“It was never going to be fair,”

“We were meant to have forever,”

Her heart breaks. Now all she has left is her thoughts running wild.

“Forever was a pipe dream, Bell,”

“It’s not fair,” he says again, anger coursing through each word and his voice has raised in volume again, so frustrated that it’s damaging. He sounds so angry, so done with what life has done to him and there’s so much emotion in it that Clarke forgets how to breathe again.

His head shoots up and he instantly moves to help her choke her way through the suffocation.

“Clarke?” Even as he asks it, she can hear the hope draining. “Please, please don’t give up,”

Clarke turns and spits another tidal wave of blood from between her teeth, blissfully ignorant to how Bellamy might react because it’s not like she’s going to have to suffer any sort of repercussions from this. If he’s not attracted to her anymore, then that’s probably a good thing. It might hurt less.

When she falls back into the sprawled, laying out position that lets her curve against his body, Clarke lets out a dry sob. The first and hopefully the only one. She’s not crying, but she may as well be. Bellamy’s grip tightens at the back of her neck, painfully and his other hand touches lightly to the top of her head to steady it, before it lands back to her cheek.

Still with that flickering touch, palms everywhere like he’s looking for the button that might end this, that might wake them both up from this nightmare.

Something warm and slick falls with it, and Clarke knows that his hand has been drenched in her blood. His skin will be a dangerous scarlet when she looks at it.

“I think this is the end of the line, Bell,”

Reaching her fist around him, just to get him closer, Clarke manages to fasten herself to his hair, and if she’s tugging at it too much then he doesn’t tell her to stop.

Being lifted up isn’t working anymore, it’s still too much pressure on her body. The only thing she’ll be able to take now is lying flat against the ground. He must understand that without her having to say anything else, because Bellamy is lowering her down and her grasp at the nape of his neck takes him with her.

This must be an uncomfortable position for him to be in, literally craning over her body, and it mustn’t feel right in the slightest. But Bellamy is crashing towards her, like their faces are stuck together with glue, like he can’t bear to separate their skin.

“I was going to give you forever,” he tries again, his voice dropping back to quietness, because she is the only one who really needs to hear what he has to say, and his cheek comes to rest against hers, grazing the hand he still holds tight to her face, and when he takes his face away, it’s going to have Clarke’s blood all over it. “I was going to give you everything,”

“You already have,” she pleads, needing him to not be broken.

He chokes, and when Clarke slides her face to try to look at him, there’s a moisture between them that wasn’t there before, that is more wet than sticky, more loaded with emotion. If that is Bellamy crying then she isn’t going to stand a chance.

“That’s not what I meant,”

“I know,”

Her lungs contract and the pain in her head resurfaces, even if it never went down in the first place. Every single part of her is starting to numb. Her stomach twists and it’s like the air is literally being squeezed out of her.

She must look like she is in agony, because she is clutching at his clothes and the skin at his scalp with a vice-like grip, her mouth opening and closing but nothing is travelling into the vacuum.

Bellamy lifts his head and hovers it over hers now, so that their eyes can meet. There is absolutely nothing in this world anymore, other than the honey melting from his eyes. If she could move, Clarke would wipe away the beads of salt water that have abandoned his heavy irises.

Her chest is rising without a rhythm, the movements jarring and sudden and fading with each one. This is her heart crying out.

“I’m not,” she tries and then realizes words aren’t going to come easily. She’s going to have to fight for them just like she’s had to fight for every single thing in her new life. “I’m not scared.”

With a torso still twitching and jolting like it’s speaking in Morse code, Clarke clings to her last few moments.

“I’m ready,”

And she is. She’s in her favorite place in the world, under Bellamy’s piercing gaze, and she’s just so tired of this now. She needs to lose the pain before it becomes her.

Something lands hot on to her nose, and Clarke realizes that a stream has formed from Bellamy’s own, tracking tears that drop regularly, like icicles melting.

“I need you,” he cries, because that is what is happening now. Bellamy is crying and he sounds so vulnerable, so desperate.

If she only has one movement left, Clarke will spend it on this.

Her palm raises and lands somewhere vaguely on to his chest, squeezes with everything she has- which really isn’t a lot- and she smiles sadly, lungs still pleading.

“You keep me in here. Keep me there, Bell, because I’m not going to leave you. Not really,”

“You want me to keep you in my shoulder?” he asks. If there were any chance of him smiling, he’d be doing just that right now. He’d be beaming like a Cheshire cat, all pearly whites and lopsided. He’s not smiling now.

“Yeah,” she answers him and flashes her teeth, lazily, in what she thinks is his favorite grin, unable to fight. “Yeah, keep me in your shoulder,”

There is silence for too long apparently. Clarke doesn’t adore it as much as she does his words, but it’s a chance to guide her lungs through the sporadic movements. Her eyes must drift closed of their own will because the second they do, something pinches her cheek, a grip between the side of his thumb and his index finger, and she flashes them back open.

“Please just stay some more,”

He says it like it’s the only thing he’s ever going to need again.

Her heart only has minutes left. She hopes that’s enough.

“Tell me something?”

Bellamy thinks about it; he really does try; she can see through his overflowing eyes that much.

“D’you get my map?” he asks when something finally comes to him, but nothing makes sense.

“Your what?”

She’s surprised any sound comes out at all.

“Okay, okay, you didn’t. That’s, that’s probably for the best,”

He’s still crying.

“Okay,” Clarke repeats because she doesn’t have the time to question what he meant.

“I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what to do,”

“Just… just hold me,” she muses.

He doesn’t hesitate. Wriggling to press more of his body tight to hers, while still leaning over her, Bellamy makes sure their faces only get closer, palm flat on her cheek like he’s protecting her from outside.

Clarke only realizes that she’s crying when her hair soaks through completely and must have turned pink with all of the blood, and she begins to wonder how on Earth the flow managed to wrap around and cover her eyes too.

It’d be nice to fall asleep right about now. That’d be a nice way to die. It might take the acid in her veins from her mind, and even if her chest is still lurching uncontrollably, it might blank that out for a while too.

She starts humming, something soft, something she knows he’ll recognize. He danced with her to this song, he gave her hope with this song, maybe it’s only right that she dies with him, to this song.

“Clarke,” his voice breaks, like actually breaks and he sounds like a thirteen year old but none of this is funny.

She reaches her hand from around his neck over to the front of his face, drifts it down so she can rest her fingers against his bottom lip.

“Your lips feel nice, Bell… Will you do me a favor?”

“Anything,” falls from his tongue instantly.

“Find someone. F-find what we had. Will you do that for me? You deserve to get that, and you, you deserve to have it with someone who can make it last. Just, just find someone else,”

His eyes squeeze tightly, and tears aren’t rolling anymore, they’re gushing.

“You won’t get it,” Bellamy tells her, tone raspy and low. “You should have read my map,”

He says that like she’ll know what it is supposed to mean. She honestly hasn’t got a clue, she really doesn’t. But he rolls on forward.

“There is no one else,”

“There doesn’t have to be someone else right now,”

If Clarke could roll her eyes, she would.

“Griffin,” he growls, but it sounds an awful lot like a purr. “There’s never going to be anyone else. I won’t ever want someone else, not when I know what I could have had with you. Truth is, a few months with you has given more than a lifetime with any other person could have given me. You have to know that, right?”

“You won’t feel that way forever,”

“It’s not a feeling,” he chokes. “It’s an inevitability. It’s a law of nature. It’s me and you Clarke,”

His last statement isn’t a statement at all: it’s a question because it’s not going to be him and her anymore.

“Bellamy Blake,” she hums out, reveling, marveling. “You are everything,”

“I’m nothing,”

“You’re everything,” and he is. “But you’re going to have to let me go,”

Bellamy doesn’t say anything but she knew that he wouldn’t. He’s never going to explicitly admit defeat with her, and she’s accepted that. But he doesn’t retaliate and that’s enough.

He lets her close her eyes and doesn’t demand for her to open them back up.

There is a concerning amount of noise coming from outside and Clarke knows she’ll never have to leave this room, but she is already worrying about Bellamy and Raven… who must be somewhere around here too.

If Clarke could just open her fucking eyes…

The thumb under her eye rubs smooth and never-ending circles all across her marred skin and his breathing is shallow, but nowhere near as shallow as hers has become.

Her chest spasms some more, her head seeps probably the last few drops of blood she has left in her body, and then she feels time stop completely, and not even Bellamy’s touch is enough to anchor her anymore.

There’s that light, beautiful and angelic in the corner of her starry, trapped vision, and it’s like a siren calling her out to sea. Clarke doesn’t move towards it, but she doesn’t have to because it enraptures her, floods through her veins like a drug, and all she can do is lie here and wait.

And then her lungs stop contracting and she’s done. She knows she’s done. Clarke knows she’s caught up in that light irreversibly, and that’s it. She just needs to wait for it to take her away now.

There is a cry somewhere very close to her, from above her, but she knows she’s completely unresponsive and there’s going to be no way to do anything now. His shout ripples through the entire building. It could curdle blood; it could melt the walls to the ground. It’s the sound of a heart breaking.

There are hands everywhere. She’s being swung around like a rag doll, until Clarke knows that he’d never move her like that. He’s just desperate and he’s rocking her, hugging her close to him, as close as he can get, so violently that the Earth shakes.

And there are streams flowing through her hair that aren’t running red at all. She knows that without needing a hint.

Somebody is pleading, begging, shouting over thunders. Ragged throat, burnt up words that are incoherent.

There are lips in her hair, tongue on her brow, teeth at her cheek, clawing their way like he might be able to dig her life back up to the surface.

And then a mouth lands firm on to hers and Clarke is trapped but his touch is insistent. It’s meaningful, it’s intentional. Well, it’s too wet, soaked through with the fusion of both their tears, and she isn’t going to taste how she normally does. She’s going to taste gross and stale and it’s not a kiss because she can’t move against him.

His lips don’t move. They stay closed, pushing into hers to give her some kind of feeling back. They stay desperate and fiercely passionate, and distraught.

This would be a kiss if Clarke could miraculously claim her life back. If this gave her the strength to banish all of the pain, and the tiredness, and the injury from her body. It makes her want to have the strength, sure, but strength doesn’t just come from nowhere.

If this were a Disney movie, if this were a fairy tale, Clarke would start moving back right about now, and they’d part a few moments later with ridiculous grins on their faces and blushes all the way up to their ears. But this life is nothing like a fairy tale, and miracles don’t exist. And Clarke stays, slowly fading towards a light that is cold and clinical and nothing like the heat in the press of his lips.

And then there is a noise coming from inside the room, a lot louder and more mechanical than Bellamy’s cries for help. And if Clarke thinks she can hear voices that she has definitely never heard before, it is probably just her half-dead brain making things up.

All she knows as she falls is Bellamy’s undying grip on every part of her body, and the way his mouth doesn’t leave hers, refuses to tear itself away because that’ll be like giving up to him. Clarke thinks that, if he could, Bellamy would keep his lips interlocked with hers for as long as it takes for her life to come back.

There are at least six pairs of boots storming around the two of them. But that’s just it, isn’t it? It is around the two of them, together. So nothing else matters.

Clarke dies with Bellamy’s mouth on hers. Not kissing. No kissing. But his mouth is on hers, he’s crying into her horrendously, and panting into her desperately. And she dies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Under the exit lights, as beautiful as ever,'  
> -Forever, Lewis Capaldi


	20. Can you guess that I'll be gone, with the twilight?

Clarke doesn’t know at what point in her life she thought up an image of death. Maybe it was when she learned of her father’s horror stories from the war. Maybe it was when she learned how to hunt, or maybe it was when she lost him.

Either way, death is exactly as she’d imagined it to be.

The first thing she notices, when she realizes she’s actually got the ability to think, is the soft cushioned ground beneath her body. It’s not ground, but it doesn’t feel as clichéd as laying on top of clouds. S’like marshmallows, she thinks. There are marshmallows under her head and what feels a lot like silky linen sheets tucked all around her.

Maybe death is like waking up. Maybe that’s why she’s in a bed.

Her head is propped up, so she’s half sitting, half lying down.

The next thing she takes in is a faint beeping noise coming from all around her, and it sounds an awful lot like a heart monitor. She’d spent enough of her time alive in hospital wards for her to be able to recognize that sound instantly. And it sounds steady, and calm, and sort of like a lullaby in the way it doesn’t need any words to it. It’s beautiful as it is, on its own.

The next thing Clarke notices, because her brain is only present enough to learn one thing at a time, is that when she opens her eyes, they’re going to be flooded with harsh beams of white light. She’s already wincing underneath the glare and her eyes are still tightly shut.

So if this is death, then it is exactly what she expected it to be, because she is surrounded by brightness, too much brightness, and the scent of disinfectant that makes everything feel clinical.

And she didn’t really expect to be alone, so when Clarke regards the weight in her hand, the one fastened to her palm like it’s an extra limb, she isn’t surprised to feel it squeeze her softly.

In fact, she likes the sensation. The kind that makes her feel like she doesn’t have to do this on her own. And so she squeezes back, not really thinking about it; her body is probably more in control of her than her mind is right now.

And then there is a choked, wet gasp, like the person holding on to her hasn’t spoken in a while, or he’s just really tired, and Clarke knows that she hasn’t heard this voice in months.

Not wanting to open her eyes, not wanting to see that after all this, her hope of getting to Vancouver was even more meaningless than ever, Clarke feels her brow pinch up and her eyes lock closed even tighter.

Wells shouldn’t be with her. Not here. Not in death.

Maybe it’s a good thing that he is, because she doesn’t think that walkers would get sent to a place like this. Maybe he just died naturally, and maybe he didn’t feel as much pain as she worries he did.

“Clarke?” is whispered but she doesn’t know which direction it comes from.

Maybe there is no direction in death. There is no space relative to space and maybe time doesn’t exist. Maybe the dimensions are made solely out of his voice, and how quietly he chooses to ask for her name, like Clarke isn’t what she is.

Seeing him again will hurt, but it is something she will have to face eventually, and she’d rather do it while she’s being held up by marshmallows.

One eye drifts open as the other one tightens shut, and she was right about the pain. Her pupil starts to burn from the light the second she opens it, and for a few moments, she can’t see anything other than a white blank page.

She feels her irises dart around the ball of her eye, hyperaware now that it’s been set aflame, and something catches on to her vision when she looks to her left.

There he is. Here he is, the only thing taking up the immaculate white landscape, infinite apart from him.

Clarke opens her mouth to speak, to say something because she’s waited so long to say anything to him that it’s a necessity now.

The only sound that comes out of her mouth is a rasp, a high pitched sort of mewling sound. And then he’s squeezing on to her hand tighter and his eye is meeting hers in encouragement and she’d forgotten how reassuring those eyes were.

“So what are you?” she manages, and her words are nothing more than a croak. “You’re my jiminy cricket, right?”

“Your what?”

Wells asks it and Clarke takes that time to explore his face. He looks no different to how he looked the last time she saw him, months before the infection even happened. Eyes are a little more tired, stubble is a little more prominent, but he looks like her Wells. Of course he would; she’s dead. She’s not going to be able to invent a whole new Wells.

His smile is the same too. Wry and small and only there if he wants you to see it. He must want Clarke to see it now because he’s smiling across at her, from the wooden chair he’d been slumped across, his arm extended to clutch at hers.

“My conscience. You’re here to show me around. Teach me how not to be a dick. You’re my jiminy cricket,”

“Hey Clarke,” is all he answers with, voice calm and reverent, even if it is seeping glee somewhere deep down.

Her throat already hurts and she knows she lifts a hand to rub at it. As she does so, Clarke notices that things aren’t as bright as they were when she first opened one eye, and so she opens the other one and only grimaces for a few seconds as she adjusts to it.

It’s nice to have both of her hands back in use. It’s been so long, so so long since she’s had that luxury. Wells’ hand falls from hers, after he tightens it briefly, and then there’s a plastic cup in her palm, filled with crystal clear, ice cold water.

She doesn’t need to feel cold anymore, that was all before she died. But it might help her talk to him, so she raises it to her lips and takes note of how steady her hand is.

It tastes really good, and the water is gone before she knows it.

He ducks his head, chuckles momentarily, and takes it from her to go and get some more, she guesses. Her hand is latching itself to his wrist because she doesn’t want him to leave her just yet. Death is a new place after all, she doesn’t want to be alone here.

“Stay,” Clarke mumbles, eyes drifting closed as she summons up the energy. “I don’t know where I am,”

“You made it, Clarke. You’re here,”

Yeah she did. She made it. She’s at rest now. This all feels so calm, so untouched before.

“Where’s here?” she smiles, eyes shut because she doesn’t actually care that much.

“Vancouver,” he laughs like there’s no other answer.

So there’s two options, Clarke’s mind tells her when her eyes flash open and lurch towards him for an explanation: either her personal version of death belongs in Vancouver, or somehow, some way, she’s still alive. No, she won’t open herself to that possibility.

“Oh. Okay. So what’s being dead like?”

He looks quite comfortable here, like he’s been sat in that seat for a pretty long time, so she just assumes that he’s been dead longer than she has. Long enough to be out of the hospital gown she’s been draped in, and long enough to be in his own clothes: an orange t-shirt and some black hiking pants.

Surely it’s too cold to be wearing that. He needs to put some layers on, she notes to remember, knowing she’ll have to tell him that when she’s more awake.

His brow tears up his face and he looks confused. The light seems to be becoming a little more natural in her vision, as features Clarke couldn’t take in before now start to expose themselves.

 “I’m not dead?” he questions unsteadily.

“Yes, you are,” Clarke hums back to him, and slowly rotates her head around her neck so she can take in the room a little more. There are two more seats on the other side of the bed she’s on, both empty but one of them has a sweater slouched over it so whoever it is will probably be back.

There’s something leaning on a cabinet on the other side of the room, but it’s at an angle where she can’t quite see what it is. It looks familiar though, and Clarke wishes she could figure it out.

There is a door. Of course there was going to be a door. But seeing it is a surprise nonetheless.

“Clarke, I’m not dead,”

Wells sounds a lot more certain now, maybe more than confused.

“But you’re my jiminy cricket. You’re meant to be that guardian angel that shows me around, you know? Teaches me how to be dead,”

“Clarke you’re not dead either,” he says bluntly. “Not anymore,”

Anymore? What does that even mean. She already wants to punch him in the face because now is not the time to be talking in riddles.

“I don’t…” she starts but her throat gives out again and she is forced to stutter over what she’s trying to say. “I’m not sure-”

The third time her voice stops sounding, Clarke just gives up and growls as loudly as she can, both arms coming up and slumping back down heavily into thin bedsheets.

“It’s okay. Take it easy,” Wells coos and startles, standing up so quickly that his chair goes flying and crashing on to the ground behind him. He’s already fussing over her, reaching to plump up the cushions beneath her head, stretching over her to tuck the sheets a little tighter and when he moves down across her arm, Clarke notices that he’s checking the needles sticking out of it.

There are at least four, but she doesn’t know if she can count any higher than that right now. There are tubes of red, blue and green all pumping fluids into the IV and she flexes her palm to feel for an effect they might have.

She knows it doesn’t work like that, but she does it anyway.

“Your body has been through hell and back,” he murmurs, sounding saddened by the thought. “It’s going to be a lot to take in.”

He leans back when she nods at him, turns briefly to pick the clattered chair up from the floor, and takes Clarke’s hand back when he sits back down. They meet eyes again, and Clarke almost lets out a sob because she is so confused, and so overwhelmed. And Wells is here and he’s with her, but she doesn’t know where here is, doesn’t know what she is right now.

“Anymore?” she asks, wondering how she could have transitioned from death to life. She sounds so weak, so broken.

“It’s a long story,” Wells assures her, half of his mouth turning up in an apologetic smile. “But we’ve got time. You made it through, Clarke,”

He clutches tighter to her hand again hopefully.

“But we, I don’t remember making it to Vancouver?” is all she can say. She died before that. She let go.

“It’s a long story,” he repeats, grimacing and flickering his eyes up to work out how much he should tell her right now.

“Are you just not telling me because you’re a figment of my imagination?” Clarke asks, cocking an eyebrow curiously, and hoping that the smirk she’s trying for is there on her face. “And because I don’t know what’s going on, that means you don’t know too?”

She’s about to keep talking, to keep probing, but Wells is moving closer at a supersonic speed and then his arms are engulfing her dangerously small body, wrapping around her shoulders and holding her tighter than he probably should if she’s still mortal. Clarke lands her hands on to his back, because if this really is Wells, and she really is alive, then she wants to hug the man that she had been fighting so hard to find. And if she is in fact dead, then she’ll hug him back anyway, because she hasn’t got anything to lose.

His heart is so loud when it grazes her chest; his heart has always been loud enough for the whole world to hear it. And its rhythm is slow and sure and one that Clarke hopes she can replicate. By the sound of the heart monitor on her left, she’s pretty sure that she’s getting close to that.

He rocks them, from side to side, breathing in wetly against her face as his ear brushes hers.

“I’m just saying, the Japanese were pretty brutal back then. She was around that area, so she could have easily been captured when she was flying over it,”

Raven has always loved debating the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, and she always does it in that same pragmatic tone that lets the victim know that she is not going to lose the argument.

Clarke is facing away from the door that she’d spotted in the far right corner, Wells having absorbed her from her left. So she can’t see Raven, but her voice flows through the entire room.

“They didn’t have one shred of hard evidence supporting that theory. Aren’t you meant to be a woman of science-”

“Oh my God,” Raven cuts Murphy’s snark short, and there is the sound of a boot stomping still on tiled floor, halting both their paths as they enter the room.

Clarke smiles into Wells’ shoulder. If they’re here too then she probably isn’t dead. She could still be dreaming, but she isn’t dead.

Wells sighs against her, and then pulls away reluctantly, his arms sticking to her shoulder as he scoots his chair closer to the bed so that he can keep it there. She waits a couple moments to take her eyes away from him, still stunned that they’ve managed to find each other, and when she turns, flicking her head just an inch so that they land in her sights, Clarke doesn’t have to doubt the smile on her face.

“Hey,” she croaks as she takes them both in.

Raven’s got her signature ponytail still suspended on her head, and she’s still wearing the same orange jacket that she’d been wearing the day Clarke died. The only thing different about her is the purple beneath her eyes, and the redness within them. It looks odd when they’re paired with her radiant, toothy grin, but Clarke finds that she makes the look work.

Murphy looks a little more different: he’s clean shaven now, his hair cut just a bit longer than a buzzcut, and he’s wearing these round trimmed spectacles that make him look ten years older than he is. But, he’s still all draped in black, and he’s still got a hand shoved deep into the pocket of his slacks.

“You’re awake,” Raven gasps, and it turns a little into a sigh.

“Jury’s out on that one,” Clarke grins, ignoring the hoarseness in her throat. “You guys see Wells too, right? It’s not just me going mad?”

Murphy shuffles forward at the same time Raven does, and they both kind of volley for the seat closest to Clarke’s head. It’s certainly a sight for sore eyes, watching them trip each other, shove each other, do whatever they can to each other to stop the other one from taking the nearest wooden stool.

Murphy ends up crashing into the nightstand on the right hand side of her bed when he takes the chair and topples off it clumsily as he throws it off balance. Trying to regain both his balance and his dignity as quickly as he can, Murphy grasps at the fallen chair and slumps back on to it without an ounce of grace.

Raven tuts her teeth, mumbles something about him having a head start, and Clarke hears herself crack up before she feels the humor reach her mind. And she’s giggling into her hand like nothing hurt her before.

“We can see him,” Raven tells her, grinning despite herself as she reaches to grip on to Clarke’s leg from where she is.

“See?” Wells smirks, and Clarke whips her head around, beaming. “And you were trying to reduce me to a grasshopper.”

She rolls her eyes as she barks a laugh.

“Cricket is literally in the name, Wells. How could you possibly get that wrong?” and then she turns to the other two as the timer goes off in her head and the reality sinks in. “Wait, yep, it’s definitely him.”

“I take it delirium is supposed to be a side effect of all this?” Murphy asks, leaning forward with a smirk and resting his elbows on to the single mattress, holding his head up like he’s about to fall asleep. His eyes stay alert and ready though, almost as though he’s drinking Clarke in.

“Woah,” Clarke gasps when she gets a better look at him, how he’s reaching out.

His hands fall down to the bed, fingertips almost touching her arm as his face tears itself up, confused and brow pinching.

“What? Is there something on my face?”

Cocking his head to the side, he starts to rub at his cheek fiercely, but Clarke just smirks at him and watches the movement.

“I just… you look like a whole new person when you’ve got both arms,”

He sighs and slumps his hands back down to the blanket. It’s like he wants to reach for her to make sure she’s definitely here, but at the same time like he’s scared to touch her.

“Yeah,” he smirks, happily. “For someone who preached about her medical abilities on the daily, you sure did a crappy job of fixing me Griffin.”

“Maybe I just liked seeing you suffer,” she bristles, folding her arms across her chest stubbornly even though she can’t really be annoyed right now.

“Well it looks like I’m not the only one with all four limbs working again,”

Her gaze shoots down to her hand, the one that had been turning black only moments ago in her memory. Now the only thing left as proof of her injury is a brilliant red scar lining her palm, signs of month old stitches healing over.

She flexes the finger at the top of it, marvels in how she can feel the movement, control it, own it because it is, after all, _her_ hand.

“Ew,” she shudders, but it might just be from glee. “That’s one hell of a scar,” and she lifts her gaze from the mended wound to look back at him. “That’s badass,”

He smirks, that iconic Murphy smirk, and he even makes it to flashing his teeth when he smiles and says lightly, “It’s good to see you, Clarke,”

“Yeah you too, Murph,”

She’s glad that Wells takes this moment to get her into a more comfortable position, because otherwise she’s going to do something pathetic like cry.

“Here let’s get you sat up,”

He hovers over her, wraps an arm under her shoulders and reaches another one beneath the blankets to scoot her leg up the bed. Clarke tries to help out but maybe her body isn’t cooperating with her as much as she thought it might, because she finds that her arms can’t take the weight of her push, and her legs won’t move when she tries to tell them to.

“It’s okay, it’ll take some time,” Wells mumbles quietly, sympathetically.

She doesn’t want sympathy though, no matter who it’s coming from, and so she shoves Wells away as softly as she can and takes her time, wriggling up the bed uncomfortably and awkwardly until she is properly sat up. It takes probably twice as long as it would have taken him to maneuver her, but she gets this smug smile on her face once she’s settled and Murphy scoffs when she doesn’t try to hide it, muttering something about how stubbornness lasts through death.

“Hey Clarke,” Raven whispers when she’s stopped fidgeting. Clarke looks over at her, and for a moment the world stops again, because Raven has welled up and she’s wiping a single tear from her eye as she studies Clarke.

“Hey Rae,” Clarke says back, just as quietly. There’s emotion that Clarke can’t identify, doesn’t have the mental capacity to know, pouring between the two of them. “We made it, huh?”

She’d never have thought, when they found each other just north of Arkansas, that they’d both have made it across the country together. It was like shooting a rocket to a satellite lightyears away, with the probability of finding sanctuary leaning more towards zero than any other number, but they’ve made touchdown. It’s quite hard to remember that she’s sore everywhere, when Clarke thinks about that.

“Yeah we did,”

“We did,” Clarke echoes, because this is worth echoing.

“I also made it,” Murphy grumbles at her right, and in this moment, Clarke thinks he looks a little like a puppy, bouncing his knees, tapping his fingers against her mattress, doing anything for attention.

Her contented gaze drifts across the room and falls on to the cabinet near the door. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now she can see a rainbow on top. Reds and blues and yellows that she never saw all winter; all sorts of flowers are arranged in bunches and Clarke can barely count them.

“What’s with all the flowers?” she asks, nodding her head over.

In her periphery, she notices Raven exchange a glance with Wells, and they have a silent conversation between the two of them, like they’ve always been able to do. Clarke guesses that there’s going to be a lot of these, as they’re debating what to tell her, how much to tell her, when they should tell her.

She understands why they might want to ease her into all of this, but knowing that she’s alive now, that she’s okay, Clarke just wants to know everything else.

Wells sighs heavily before he starts talking, but Clarke doesn’t tear her eyes away from the flowers.

“You guys are something of a legend around here,” he begins, and she can’t tell if he sounds proud or wary, probably a little of both. “No one really believes that you got here all the way from New Orleans. Those that do have all visited you at least once,”

Clarke lets her head fall back against the pillows, and she squints, wondering what is off about the display. Because there is definitely something that she’s missing, something hiding in plain sight that she should be seeing, and yet she knows she can’t.

“This doesn’t feel real,” she hums, lets her eyelids flutter shut for a moment.

“It took us weeks for it all to settle in. I slept on the floor for the first couple,”

As Murphy says it, he keeps his scrutiny focused on one of the corners of the room, and Clarke follows it to see a thin blanket scrunched up into a ball over there.

“In here?”

When she spins back to look at him in surprise, he’s opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish, clearly oblivious as to how to answer her.

“We didn’t want to leave you alone,” Raven settles on, and Clarke doesn’t miss how her vacant hand comes to rest upon Murphy’s shoulder, the other still gripping on to Clarke’s knee.

Clarke’s about to ask another question, but she’s interrupted by a rumbling coming from somewhere below the sheets, and she looks down to peer at her gurgling stomach, so loud that it’s shaking the room.

Raven snorts and lifts herself off the chair, turning her back as she walks over to a table that Clarke hasn’t noticed. Whatever she reaches for is obscured by her body.

“You should probably try eating something solid now that you’re awake. It’ll be good for you,” Wells tells her, smiling fondly.

Clarke grins back, lifts her palm to land on his arm.

“Thanks Jiminy,”

“Why do I feel like it’s going to take a while to convince you I’m really here?”

“Because you don’t know how long it took to find you,”

“Here you go,” Murphy nudges her, having caught a protein bar that Raven tossed over to him, in the hand that Clarke remembers setting twice over. “Eat,”

“Wow,” Clarke gasps, taking the packet in her hands. “I didn’t even have to skin it myself,”

“Eat,” he says again. “You’ve got a lot to catch up on,”

She pecks at it, nibbles and realizes that her mouth has forgotten to chew the food on its own, and that she’ll have to guide her jaw through it after a while of no practice.

“How long have I been out?” she asks with her mouth full, not caring if it’s ugly.

“A few months,” Raven shrugs as she takes a seat at the foot of the mattress, clearly not happy with how far away the end chair feels now that Clarke is awake. She accidentally falls to rest on top of Clarke’s ankle, and she must make a face because Raven shifts away just as quickly, coming to a halt at the corner of the bed. “It’s around the middle of May now. I think I heard someone say it’s like the sixteenth,”

“Four months?” Clarke demands, voice raising higher than it has yet. How has she been out for four months? It feels like they were on the road only moments ago.

“Yeah…”

The way Raven says it is off. Like she’s just stating facts but it’s more than that. A wave of guilt floods through the tubes in Clarke’s arm, and into her bloodstream, because it sinks in that this can’t have been easy for them. She supposes she was unresponsive that whole time, and if they really didn’t leave her alone then they would have had to sit and watch helplessly.

Murphy clears his throat beside her, and he grumbles and fidgets before he opens his mouth to speak.

“We had to fight for your life support pretty hard. A few of ‘em wanted to shut you off after the first couple of days but- ouch!”

He jumps off his seat, and his knee shoots up into his clasped hands like he’s just been kicked.

“Shut it,” Raven scowls at him pointedly.

“No it’s okay,” Clarke rushes to say. “I want to know everything,”

Murphy leaves his lips clamped together though, and he nods at both Wells and Raven for either of them to carry it on, knowing that the two of them will use more tact than he can hope to have.

Of course, Wells is the one to keep telling her, knowing exactly what she needs even after not having seen her for a year.

“Nobody thought you’d make it through, Clarke,” he says quietly, trying to keep his voice under control. She manages to pick up on the few cracks though, the kind that let her know that he’s been up close and personal with her this whole time, that he’s had to watch her fade between life and death for months. “Your heart stopped twice over the last few months, just gave out and on the first time, the doctors in the ward decided to call it.”

She doesn’t know which part of that to cling to. _Heart stopped_. _Doctors_. _Ward_. Does that mean she’s somewhere else now?

“They said they needed the support for more _‘viable’_ patients,” His snarl is unmistakable, and he sounds angry which is rare for Wells. She can count on her hand the number of times she’s seen him truly, genuinely angry. But he’s clenching her wrist so hard that his nails are piercing the skin, and she shoots her eyes down to notice that his knuckles are all bruised up and split. “The second time was even worse,”

“What do you mean?”

Wells opens his mouth to keep talking, but he shuts it after a few more seconds and closes his eyes with it, shaking his head slightly because maybe he’s reached his limit.

“You’ve turned into a bit of an icon here, Clarke,” Raven’s words are lighter than his were, but Clarke can hear how forced the steady tone is, how much she’s trying to make herself sound okay. “People either see you as a symbol of hope or as… a waste of time,”

The word ‘people’ sounds so distant when it falls on Clarke’s raw ears.

“And you told me off for being so harsh,” Murphy snorts, earning himself another kick to the shins.

“The whole place turned into meltdown,”

“The vast majority thought you’d pull through though,” Wells says breathily. “And there was no doubt in any of our minds that you would,”

He’s pointing between the three of them, forming a little triangle but the longer Clarke watches the movement, she sees how it evolves into a square. Maybe that’s how he sees the four of them.

She feels something warm trickle down her cheek, but she doesn’t bother to slide it away. So she was right about thinking she’d died. But it sounds like it took her longer to die than she’d guessed… and how many times. She certainly didn’t get that right either.

And the three of them just had to sit and watch her, watch her die over and over again.

“Clarke don’t you dare feel guilty about this,” Raven warns, catching on to the reason why she has started to cry. Clarke never cries, so she assumes that some part of this must be coming from the physical and mental strain of being awake after being unconscious for so long.

There is a thumb on her cheek, and Clarke doesn’t really recognize Murphy’s rough swipe.

“Just sounds like more hassle that it was worth,” she mumbles, playing with her fingers. “I would have pulled the plug, that’s all,”

“Bullshit,” Raven scoffs back. “Bullshit would you have pulled the plug,”

Yeah, maybe she wouldn’t have. But that’s different.

“My heart really stopped?”

She can’t believe it, not when the sounds of it are streaming from a computer right next to her, as steady as a base drum.

“Twice,”

“Shit,”

“Turns out I’m a bit of an omen,” Murphy grins, tossing an almond into his mouth that seems to have come from his pocket. “I was here when it happened both times.”

“Were you messing with the dials or something?”

All he does is match her smirk, winks over, and then tries to throw one into her mouth too. But she’s smiling and even if she’d been expecting it, it would have landed in her hair anyway like it does now.

“It’s good to have you back, Clarke,”

She recognizes the words, in some form or another.

“You’ve already said that,”

“Meant it,” he shrugs, and turns to glance over at Raven briefly, just for the sake of it.

“So you guys really stayed with me the whole time?” Clarke asks, unable to believe that they kept someone in the room after all those months.

“Um,” Raven starts, and she reaches to scratch at the back of her neck awkwardly.

That movement looks familiar, too familiar. Clarke has seen someone do that hundreds of times. Not Raven though… who else? When Raven does it, Clarke hears the heart monitor start to pick up, only noticeable because she can feel the same pace accelerate all the way through her body. Her breathing comes out a little more raggedly, and her eyes flutter heavily.

All because she saw someone scratch the back of their neck.

There’s that missing something again. Like it’s drifted from her mind, been banished or…

“We’ve always kept someone in here. We’ve all come in here whenever we could. Murphy took that corner, I took that one, and Wells was over there. On the nights you got really bad we’d camp out and piss the medics off like crazy because they kept moaning about how we were in the way. But this place is chaos and they’ve dragged us all in to work. Wells is lucky; he got to keep his shifts so you’d always be in his rotation and we always managed to steer it so that there’d always be one of us. Don’t worry Clarke, you’ve never been alone,”

It’s too much to take in. Clarke tries to clear the fuzziness from her mind but it’s already settled.

“That’s a lot,” she repeats to herself, out loud this time. And then there’s another pinch to her wrist but it isn’t painful; it’s what she needs. It is Wells, looking at her like he’s getting ready to catch her, even if she’s already encompassed in the safety of the bed. “I can’t believe you’re here, after all this time,”

“Yeah,” he whispers, and there’s no hiding the emotion in his voice anymore. He sounds just as overwhelmed as she feels.

“So I didn’t wake up at all?” Clarke asks when she has decided the fog has started to clear, easing once she’s looked at him for a while.

“Did she just completely forget the whole heart stopping thing?” Murphy scoffs on her right, fist landing heavily on the bed impatiently.

“No,” Raven grimaces, ignoring him. “They think you were in a coma, but they wouldn’t officially classify it,”

“Why not?”

“You were a weird case,” Wells cuts in, probably knowing more about the medical side of things than the other two. “The infection was crazy fast, and the symptoms didn’t match up with anything we’ve seen before… and then there was that damned cut on your head,”

Just saying the words alerts Clarke to the place where it should be throbbing, where it should be aching. She reaches a tentative hand to ghost over where she’d hit it and feels a gnarly, ragged lump of stitches underneath her fingertips. If it’s taking this long to heal, then it must have been bad.

“How do I even have a hand?” she asks when she brings it back down and takes in the scar.

Raven and Wells swap glares again, and it’s probably the least subtle thing she’s ever seen. What are they challenging the other one to say? What are they leaving out? There is so much. So much they aren’t telling her.

“Let’s just say the… medical officer is one of the best,” Wells says as he clears his throat.

“So… I can shoot again,”

He ducks his head and smiles uncontrollably.

“It might take some time to get used to it with all of the scarring. But a Clarke Griffin that isn’t shooting, isn’t really a Clarke Griffin at all, is she?”

“I guess not,” she hums. “I can’t wait,”

And she can’t. Because she’s alive. And she’s safe. And she’s surrounded by her family, and if the sight of the empty chair makes her chest heave a little too roughly, Clarke doesn’t know why.

“You haven’t got a bunk yet. The whole coma thing kinda put you to the bottom of the list of the room assignments but I’m working on getting you in with me,” Raven rambles casually. “I made up all this crap about how you’ll be emotionally compromised after all of this, so you’ll need to be surrounded by familiar faces- yeah trust me, I know it’s bullshit but, Clarke, if I’m being totally honest, I just want to see you alive again,”

“I’m looking forward to seeing me alive again too, Rae,”

Clarke looks around the room again, knowing now that she has all the time in the world to do so. And her gaze falls back to the table of flowers, the orchard clustered over a square foot, and she still can’t work out what’s wrong.

There is something nagging, pulling at the back of her mind and she can’t find the string to stop it. In her periphery, they’re all still throwing worried looks to each other, and for a moment, no one meets her eyes. They look guilty…

Raven is biting her lip, like whatever she wants to say is hurting her to keep it in, but like it’ll hurt Clarke more to let it out.

Murphy’s got a bruise on his face, Clarke notices. Upon closer inspection she sees he’s got more than just one: there are all sorts of faded marks across the skin of his cheeks. Some of them look fresh, and there are others that look like they’ve almost healed.

She switches back to where Wells is running his fingers over the back of her hand, rubbing out any subconscious tension that she’s storing there. She wants to know why his knuckles are all split, why the skin on his hand is purpling.

Looking between the two men on either side of her, Clarke tries to find any sort of stiffness between them, any rigid stances that might follow after a fist fight. But she doesn’t find the hostility that she’s looking for, and if anything, there’s a trust between them that she’d never have been able to guess at.

It’s here, across the stretch of the mattress. The four of them, it feels like, against the world. There is ease and there is peace and their wounds look wrong here. She feels a tear roll down her cheek again, and at first she thinks it’s because she’s just overwhelmed.

She is, after all, alive. And she made it. And she’ll learn how lasting all this damage is going to be later because all that matters is right now.

And then Clarke realizes it’s more than that. She guesses it’s because she’s happy. She’s got her family all around her, she’s got a second chance at life and they’re treating her like she hasn’t caused them four months of anguish. Like her fading between the two realms wasn’t a torment, even if the bags under their eyes say differently.

But the pulse surrounding them has slowed, and it’s become unsteady, and Clarke realizes it’s not happy. There’s too much missing to be crying of happiness.

There’s a lost puzzle piece. There’s a chunk of her that she hasn’t got anymore. She’s verging on miserable, and the only part of her that knows why, is her stunted heart.

She chokes, raises her fingers to the scar on her head like it might flick a switch and help her think.

It’s a momentary flicker, but for a second, all she sees are bloodied hands. Grossly bloodied hands that could have easily come from one of her horror movies. But she recognizes those hands and she can’t remember why.

Her hair has been braided out of her face and she hopes it makes her look a little more normal. But then there is a voice in her head telling her that it looks better down, and she keeps crying soberly.

“Hey,” Wells hushes, and moves his chair so close that he may as well be sat on the bed too. “Clarke, you’re okay now I promise,”

 _I promise_.

He’s reading her wrong, but Clarke doesn’t blame him. She doesn’t know what’s happening to her either. Maybe this is the lasting damage. Maybe she’ll never feel connected to her emotions again.

“We’ve got you back,”

This is _Wells_. Wells is here. She tried so, so hard to get back to him.

“You’re okay,”

But that sounds familiar. She’s heard that said so many times. With just as much certainty as Wells is using, even though she wasn’t wrapped up in linen sheets, and she’d been on the other side of dying back then.

“How,” she falters, shoving the tears away angrily as she looks to Raven. “How did we even get here?”

Raven’s eyes start melting when she asks it. Whatever she’s been holding back, at least some part of it is going to seep out of her liquid eyes.

“What do you remember?”

It is said as a whisper. It is said as a warning.

But that’s the thing, the only thing Clarke remembers is that there’s something she’s forgotten. She tries, painfully, to take the steps backwards, inching through her mind to the moment that feels like it was only yesterday.

“I remember… we were on the stairs. You, you had your hand on my mouth,” she stumbles and Wells makes a sound in the back of his throat, almost like a whimper. Something is wrong. He’s looking at her with Raven’s liquescent eyes. “I tasted like blood, and, and you were pulling me somewhere and there were arms,”

“Clarke-” Murphy whispers, but it’s too late.

She remembers falling. She remembers tearing her head open. And she remembers his arms, his screams. She’d forgotten them… how? No one would forget screams like that. Tortured and morbid.

And now she knows why she was studying the flowers so curiously. There are three dandelions caught up in the middle of it all, hovering in a plastic cup, not unlike the one she drank from earlier, and they are leaning apart from each other, as far as they can get.

There are dandelions. And there is an empty seat. And he’s not here.

“Oh my God,” she hears herself say, but she can’t see anything through the puddles in her eyes. “What- where is he? He’s not, he’s not here,” because he isn’t.

Yeah, she’s definitely not happy. Clarke can hear the sounds of her sniveling over the elevated beeping of the heart monitor and she hates all of it. She doesn’t know what she’s doing when the corners of the blanket are being ripped from her body, but there is ground beneath her trembling feet so she must be standing up.

And then there is a pain in her wrist when she tries to march to the door, and she remembers that she’s still hooked up to the IV, and her skin splits under the needle as it ricochets backward.

“He’s not here. I need to see him. Why can’t I see him?”

The words are tumbling relentlessly, and Clarke can’t catch them. She doesn’t make it one step before she finds herself sprawled out on the icy floor; knees having buckled under the weight of her.

“Clarke,” someone tries again, and there are hands clutching to her shoulders. Murphy’s hands, they have to be.

“Let me go!” she shouts, and wriggles away from his grasp pathetically. “I need to get to him. You need to let me get to him!”

Murphy’s grip doesn’t loosen, but he’s not trying to move her anywhere. He’s just pinning her down to where she’s collapsed and he’s waiting it out.

“Get off! I need to find Bellamy!”

And it’s the first time she’s so much as thought his name but once she’s yelled it to the tiny space they’re in, something inside her breaks and she stops struggling against him. Because none of this makes sense. He’d be here, she knows he would. If there was a chance that he could be here, he would. And the realization makes her sob even harder.

“Clarke,” Murphy mumbles and his voice sounds strong. How is he strong?

When she slumps, he takes it as an acceptance, and instead of forcing her into the floor, he guides her up to a sitting position slowly. And he dithers only for a moment before she’s wrapped up in his arms, tightly and awkwardly.

“I didn’t remember, I didn’t. He’s not,” but her words are muffled by his shoulder, and she knows that when she tears her face away from him, there’s going to be a puddle in his t-shirt too.

“I know,” Murphy says back, but it’s not what she thought she needed to hear. She expected assurance, or sympathy. He says it angrily, venomously like he’s spitting the words out.

The next thing Clarke knows, is she’s being lifted up off the ground and tucked back into the bed. As he worries over her, Clarke can barely recognize who he is, and barely feels Wells readjust all of the needles that she’d torn out.

She doesn’t look to her forearm, guessing that she’s probably bleeding and she’s seen enough of her blood to last a lifetime.

Instead she catches Raven’s broken frown.

“Raven?” she pleads, needing to know. “I can’t see him. Why can’t I see him?”

There must be something in her tone because Raven shoves Murphy out of the way and hastens to squirm her way up the bed.

She doesn’t lay down next to Clarke, probably only because Clarke is so fragile, but she sits in a space next to her stomach and leans forward.

“He’s not dead, Clarke,” she whispers confidently, gushing. “Look at me, he isn’t dead,”

“I don’t understand. He’s here right? He made it with us?”

There’s so much doubt in her voice that it doesn’t sound like it belongs to her anymore. And what isn’t doubt is all pain.

Raven winces like she’s just been punched. She’d been expecting this all along, Clarke thinks. This was the ticking time bomb.

“Yeah, Clarke, he made it with us,”

She doesn’t say anymore until she has shuffled along the plane of the bed uncomfortably. Dithering between wanting to comfort Clarke, wanting to let Wells do it and wanting to be out of harm’s way when Clarke springs off the mattress again.

“Get back into bed and we’ll tell you everything,”

Clarke gestures to the blankets tucked up around her neck, the pillows plump beneath her head, but Raven isn’t talking about what she should do now, she’s saying it as a warning not to explode again.

“You can’t push yourself too hard; your body is going to be under so much stress right now. We’ll get you whatever you need,”

Then why isn’t Bellamy here?

Wells clears his throat; sighs heavily like he’s bracing himself.

“You said you remember the hospital?”

“Where’s Bellamy?”

“Clarke are you gonna let me explain or not?” he snaps and her jaw drops.

He’s never acted like this, never been this angry in front of her. He’s got his fist screwed so tightly into her sheets that she starts to feel sorry for the stark linen. He wouldn’t treat her like this if he were pissed off at her.

Them and Raven have never acted in that way. They understand that sticking together has always been more important than whatever issue they have.

So Wells isn’t angry with Clarke. She knows that.

“No. I need to see him. I’m alive, right? And he is too. He’s here, so, so if he’s working then please just go find him and tell him that I’m awake. He’ll come,” she says hopefully, thinking back to how Raven told her that they’ve got them all working like dogs.

He swaps another look with Raven and Clarke’s confidence slips.

“Clarke, that’s, um, that’s not gonna happen,”

“What?” she whispers, losing her breath.

It’s Murphy’s turn now, apparently, as he scoots down like this is a dance sequence, choreographed and rehearsed to perfection.

“You remember the hospital. That’s what you said, yeah?” he tries, cautiously.

Clarke gives in, tumbles back through the blurred memories.

If she cooperates then maybe they’ll start listening when she tells them what she needs.

“We’d just found the two of you,” she says to Murphy. “I think I remember being carried or… or held or something. I remember bright lights, because there were no windows in the, the… closet? So there shouldn’t have been lights that bright,” at least not outside of her fading mind, because they were everywhere. “There was noise. I know it was a lot but it’s all just kinda melted together,”

She pauses to let the blood start flowing through her head again.

“But Bellamy was there, and he was holding me. I heard him say my name, I swear it,”

Those red-stained flashbacks start to throw themselves forward. His shoulder, they were supposed to laugh about that for some reason. She remembers telling him to let her go but then after that, everything has faded out. There was too much noise by then for Clarke to figure out what was going on, what was happening to her.

“We sent some guys on a supplies recovery,” Wells offers up. “We needed all the medicine we could get; bandages, antiseptic, anything,”

“We got so lucky, Clarke. We were completely outnumbered. There must have been at least a couple hundred walkers and we were two men down because Bellamy had to get you to somewhere safe. If the team hadn’t been there to get us out, we all would have died,” Raven tells her.

“The team?”

The brunette sighs again, thinks for a moment and then decides “It’s a long story,”

Clarke throws her head back a little too hard against the pillows behind her in response, then instantly regrets it.

“They had a jeep, managed to get you in and then we followed with ‘em,”

Murphy misses out way too many details there: how on Earth did they get down from the floor they were on in the first place?

“They brought us here,”

“And Bellamy?” Clarke asks and then she gets another slap in the face. “Oh my god, Octavia?”

Raven closes her eyes for a few seconds longer than normal.

“They’re both safe, Clarke,”

“But they aren’t here?”

“Maybe we should leave this for when she’s fully healed,” Wells tries to cut in but-

“Wells either you tell me what the hell is going on now, or goddammit I’ll find them myself,”

“Bellamy doesn’t want to see you!”

“Murphy!”

His voice bounces off the walls of the room, makes it feel impossibly small as the echo lasts at least ten cycles of Clarke’s heart.

Again, he’s not angry either. Just tired, just frustrated.

“What?” Clarke stutters out and she feels the train of thought tower down into the puddles of her mind, losing itself.

“Clarke, I don’t, I don’t think Bellamy is in the right headspace right now,” Wells tries his best, unrelentingly desperate to move on to any other subject.

Murphy snorts on her side, vicious and conniving.

“He’s changed Clarke,” Raven pushes at him with the base of her foot, speaking diplomatically now that she knows Clarke isn’t going to give up without a fight.

“That doesn’t matter,” she scoffs, not able to make any sort of link that would ensure Bellamy ‘changing’ has anything at all to do with him not being at her bedside too. “He’ll want to see me.”

When she says it this time, Clarke can hear how the doubt has seeped into her words.

“He’s been through a lot since we got here. Trust me, we tried to get him to at least visit but he didn’t budge,”

“Bellamy wouldn’t do that. Bellamy wouldn’t leave me,”

“He’s not here Clarke,” Murphy says tiredly.

Her lungs catch themselves and this hurts so much more than when it’d happen out on the road, because now he’s not here to ease them.

The thought that they are in the same place, possibly feet away from each other, burns through her completely and Bellamy isn’t here to fan that smoke into flames.

He’s not here.

“I can’t,”

“Hey, go easy,” Wells rushes, somehow patiently when he notices Clarke struggling for her breath. “Go easy. We shouldn’t have told you all of this right now: you need to take care of yourself. We’ll fill you in on everything once you’ve recovered.”

She raises her arms when he tries to get her to lie down.

“No, Wells, I need to see Bellamy,”

“We’ve tried Clarke, but he’s not the same person that he was before you…”

 _Died_ , she thinks. _before I died._

The word rushes all the way over her, prickles at the skin underneath the sheets and she realizes that it’s brought with it a wave of fatigue that must have been hovering over her all this time.

“Will you stay?”

It’s the only thing she has left on her tongue. This all sounds much too complicated to deal with while she’s still feeling like this. Maybe they’re just confused and maybe Bellamy is on his way right now. That’s okay. At least she knows that she’s going to wake up again; she never had that luxury before.

“Of course,”

“Okay,” she hums. “Okay. I’ll find him tomorrow,”

Her eyes flutter closed after she’s taken Wells in once more. She’s going to have him now too.

Clarke focuses on the heavy set breathing all the way around her, and the steady beeping of the heart monitor. She’ll have to check what meds she’s on tomorrow; just so she can get an idea of the recovery period.

“Someone should probably go and tell them,” Raven whispers after enough time has passed for Clarke to have fallen asleep. It’s a shame she didn’t give her more; everything is going to be a little more slow for her at the moment.

Clarke hopes the flickering twitch that her shut eyelids make isn’t enough to give her away. She’ll just go to sleep when they’ve finished talking. If they’re going to drop a few more hints as to what’s going on then she’d rather just hear that.

She doesn’t have the strength to look around right now though. She’ll have to settle for this.

“I’ll find Abby,”

Abby? No. It can’t be.

Clarke saw her mother die; watched as she ran off into the heart of the massacre. There’s no way.

There are plenty of people with that name, she tries to tell herself. There are thousands of Abby’s all around the world.

“You want to take Bellamy, or shall I?” Murphy drawls, his hushed voice sounding nothing more than unimpressed.

“I should probably do it. We all know what happened the last time you two were in the same room together,”

Clarke has a feeling this has something to do with the bruising around Murphy’s face and her stomach flips itself over at the thought.

“You shouldn’t have told her about him,”

“It was that or have her hunting through the place, trying to find someone who doesn’t want her,”

Ouch. Yeah, that one hurts.

There’s silence for a while more. Maybe it’s for the theatrical effect. After all, a comment like that deserves some time to be left to fester.

“You think he’ll come now that she’s awake?” Murphy asks after Clarke has started to nod off properly. She thinks he might sound hopeful, but the hope itself sounds tired, sounds like it’s been round and round in circles for months.

“It’s worth a try. It’s what she wants,”

Raven on the other hand, surprisingly, lets her voice sound dead. Is that because she thinks that Clarke isn’t listening anymore? Was the calmness, the caution all a façade? Is she angry like the other two?

It’s not what they want. They don’t want him to come and see her, but Clarke’s slipping consciousness can’t figure out why the man who begged for her to stay alive would keep his distance. Why he wouldn’t be at her bedside the second she woke up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Can you guess that I'll be gone- with the twilight?'  
> \- Tompkins Square Park, Mumford and Sons


	21. Oh roses, they don't mean a thing

Numb doesn’t feel very numb. Numb isn’t… nothing right now. Pain hurts and it doesn’t feel centralized either; it’s more of a spread, more of a seeping, leeching rush and the only way to track it is by following her bloodstream.

It’s not a lot, but it’s the only thing Clarke can do as she wakes up. It’s an agonizing slip and slide that makes her wish that her body is smaller; maybe then the pain will have less places to run to.

There’s a stabbing feeling in her arm, and there’s some pressure building up within it. The flow of something synthetic coming from something else mechanical. The beeping is steady, patient like it’s waiting for something to happen.

That’s her heart, right? That’s her heart waiting for something happen.

“You stayed?”

One of her eyes is open but Clarke doesn’t know which one. She can see a man, attached to her by their palms and watching the center of her body like he’s guarding it.

There are no lights on in the room which is strange because when she’d woken up for the first time it was all she could see.

His eyes flicker over to her when she makes the croaked sound.

“You thought I wouldn’t?” Murphy asks, confused.

Clarke tries to wriggle back up the bed, but he’s got one of his hands locked into hers and her other one is roped up so heavily that she’s scared to move it.

Instead, she shrugs and tries to raise the arm attached to the machines on her left, her mouth falling open in a chortled gasp. She sucks in a sharp, quick stream of air and Murphy shuffles to help her up, cranes over the supply into her forearm to adjust it.

When he checks the needle, Clarke notices the familiar feel of crisp blood flaking from the surface of her skin and she tries not to look at it.

“More drugs,” is all she can say.

He lifts the corner of his mouth on one side, then wanders casually over to the colored bags that Clarke can’t see.

It only takes a couple moments for something else to start spreading through her system and she almost moans out loud at the relief.

This is what numb should feel like.

“I don’t think you understand,” Murphy shrugs when he reclaims his seat, elbows coming to rest on the mattress so that he can hold his head up.

“No,” she hums back. “Maybe I don’t.”

“To you, this must all feel like a blip. Like we were wading through the highway hours ago, huh?”

“Yeah kinda. Guess I took a shortcut,”

Her gaze drifts across the dimmed out room and falls to rest on the spinney object leaning against the flowered cabinet.

“Is that my bow?”

“Sure is. We had to replace the string. It got snapped when we were fighting but we kept it with us,”

She thinks for a while, twitches her finger shallowly and makes the grip that she would always make if her bow was in her hands. It will be good to shoot again.

“It was pretty bad, huh?” Clarke asks, nudging her knee against his elbow.

“It made Nebraska feel empty, like it was safe,”

“I know that I was there. I know that I should know what happened but… I just don’t,”

“That’s alright,” he mumbles, hand awkwardly patting the mattress by her side like he’s trying to reach for her. “If it helps, we’ve all been bored out of our minds for weeks. Filling you in on it all will be a good thing to do to fill the time,”

Another spark lights itself in Clarke’s mind and she remembers something else.

“You’ve been working, right?”

He grimaces, looks up to the ceiling and then turns back.

“Of a sorts,”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s complicated. But they’ve been talking about you since they found us so I’m guessing you’ll find out soon enough,” he tells her, carrying something that sounds a lot like bitterness in his voice.

“The team?”

“Yeah,” he smirks humorlessly. “The team. Like Raven said, it’s a long story,”

Clarke nods her head, figuring she’s getting quite good at this whole patience thing. They let silence absorb them for some time more because it’s dark and there is too much to say so it’s probably better that they are saying nothing at all. At least for some time.

She stares bullets through her bow, wants to learn it all the way again and she knows it won’t be hard to do, but maybe she should take her time with it since she doesn’t really know herself enough.

“When are they gonna let me out?”

She wants to know when she’s going to meet with any of the doctors that might be able to talk her through the meds she’s on. She wants to see anybody from this place, just so she knows it’s all real.

He lets out a snort.

“Double heart failure, fatal concussion to the skull, blood poisoning that almost lost you your elbow, and a fever that made hell look cold. And she wants to walk out the same day she wakes up from her four month long coma,”

“I don’t _feel_ like all those things happened,” she sulks and rolls her eyes lazily.

“You will though,” Murphy smirks back, nodding over to the IV and the bags of fluid that must be carrying a hundred different kinds of anesthetic.

“Hmm,” Clarke closes her eyes. “Where are the other two?”

“Raven is trying to get you some clothes of your own and she’s been negotiating a shared room between the two of you ever since we got you stable,”

“She feels sorry for me,”

“She is pissed off,” he corrects. “We all are,”

Clarke throws her head against the pillows some more.

“You can’t say shit like that and then expect me to not need to know more,”

He smiles, a little sadly before he rolls his eyes back at her.

“Patience, Griffin,”

“Murphy,” Clarke warns, voice dropping so that he takes her seriously. She can’t bear knowing only half truths right now. If they aren’t going to tell her everything, then it’s going to be better to just know nothing.

He ducks his head, and Clarke catches the opportunity to change the subject.

“Where’s Wells?”

“He’s on duty. He works in the med ward,”

“Is that not where we are?”

“No, they don’t have any private rooms in the infirmary,” Murphy tells her, looking around the walls. “You’re in a recovery room, kind of. Us three were getting in the way when you were in the med ward and once we’d convinced them that you would be able to pull through, they decided to just let you heal in a place of your own,”

Clarke nods again, takes it in, channels it. She looks back over to her bow, but the cabinet catches her eye before she can really settle on to it. There are still flowers draped in all sorts of vases, all sorts of jam jars and metal tins across the stack of drawers.

It is spring, she thinks. It’s almost summer. Of course all of these flowers have been laid here flippantly, there must be all sorts outside.

“So… lots of visitors?”

“You could say that,” Murphy breathes heavily in through his nose and turns to follow the way she’s looking.

The dandelions at the heart of the table draw Clarke in like magnets. She can’t remember how many there were before she fell asleep, but there are four there now. Still all pulling apart, still all repelling.

“Celebrity is fucked,”

“Everyone has been here?” she asks, staring straight to the weeds because there’s something she’s still missing.

“No,”

“Of course,”

Of course not everyone has been here.

“Clarke,” Murphy says quietly when he revolves on his seat and leans back towards her. “We’re gonna be alright now. We’re safe,”

She looks at him as well and she feels herself cock an eyebrow warily.

“We’re never going to be safe again. You know that, right?”

“The world isn’t in the dark anymore. There are bases like this all over the planet,”

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to stay uncontaminated,”

“Nah,” he waves a hand in her direction; a dismissal. “This is a whole new level of security compared to Nebraska. They’ve got these huge fuck off gates all around us,”

“But they let people out?” she says knowingly.

“No,” Murphy answers again, just as confident as before. “Not like that,”

“The ones who found us?”

He braces her with a tired glare, stares straight into her eyes as he waits for whatever he’s thinking to sink in.

“The team,” she sighs, rolling her eyes again and thinking back to how many times they’ve been referenced since she woke up from the coma. Having spoken of them so much, it wouldn’t be completely outrageous to assume that she’d know a little more about who they are.

She doesn’t even want to think about that damn team until _someone_ is happy to actually talk her through it all, instead of leaving gaping holes in a pre-rehearsed story that has been designed to comfort her.

“You still look weird,” Clarke tells him when he leans his head back onto both palms. It’ll be strange getting used to a fully functioning Murphy.

“You don’t look so great yourself, Griffin,”

What must she look like? Has she changed a lot in four months? What if she doesn’t even recognize herself the next time she looks in the mirror.

If Bellamy were here, he’d already be scolding Murphy. He’d already be snapping something about how she doesn’t look any different, doesn’t look any less like his Clarke. He’d be telling her, through hushed whispers only meant for her, how beautiful she is despite everything.

But he’s not here. He’s not. And Murphy is, smirking at her through the shadows of a room that is starting to become the center of everything she knows to be real, to be tangible.

“No windows, huh?”

“Yeah there aren’t many anywhere,”

“Toto,” Clarke says as she peers around the room, the cell. “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,”

He lets a sound escape his throat that might be a laugh. And Clarke looks back at him with a satisfied grin on her face.

“When am I going to be allowed to leave?” she asks again, thinking back to how green the trees are going to be when she sees them next.

Murphy sighs heavily, like he’s been waiting for her to push the point forward.

“Doctor checked you over after you fell asleep. Said you’re gonna need to stick around for a while longer,”

“Why?”

“You haven’t been awake for four months, Clarke. It’ll take some time to get used to everything,”

“I hate this,”

“Knew you would,”

“You know, you don’t have to be so smug,” she says, pushing at his shoulder but nowhere near hard enough to move him.

“Oh trust me,” he snarks, “I’m not smug. It just means I’ll be alright to hang out here for a little while longer.”

Clarke scoffs before she asks: “You actually like being stuck in here?”

“It’s better than my room,”

“Why?”

Murphy leans his head to the side, thinks and then grins.

“I’m in with Wells; he snores,”

“Yeah,” Clarke smiles back. “He does. So you two get on then?”

“Weirdly. He’s a good guy and he loves you to bits. S’probably the only thing we’ve got in common but it’s enough. Like I said, he’s a good guy. Four months of this,” he winces, waving his head all around the room and pointing intentionally to the beeping heart monitor. “It’s one of those things that make you bond with someone,”

It makes Clarke happy that Murphy has accepted someone else. It makes her feel a little more like there’s going to be a life waiting for her once she gets out of this place.

“So if you’re bunking with Wells, why is it so hard for Raven to get me in with her?” she can’t help but ask.

“It’s… team rules,”

The groan Clarke makes is hoarse and weak, but it carries with it all of the frustration that is building up inside her.

“For fuck’s sake,”

He’s about to respond, retort ready and waiting on his lips but there is a tapping sound coming from somewhere outside the room. Both of them shoot their heads to it and it turns into three distinct knocks.

Clarke manages to figure that Raven and Wells don’t knock, because Murphy wouldn’t be reacting like this if it were them.

The door is in the corner of the room and Clarke can barely make it out because it hides away from the only source of light in the room: faint rainbow LEDs erupting from the machines. Murphy, maybe he doesn’t realize what he’s doing, shifts in his seat to face it and spreads out some more. Like he’s forming some sort of protective shield in between the door and Clarke.

The knock sounds again and it’s heavier this time.

She manages to get herself upright properly and cranes to see if she can recognize any of the tells of the person behind the wall.

She doesn’t want the door to open. The thought that it might be Bellamy terrifies her, but the thought of it being anyone else at all is worse.

Murphy twists his neck back a little, to glance briefly at Clarke and send her a look of reassurance before he stands.

“I’ll get it,” he mutters lowly, and she doesn’t really know why he’s whispering.

That could be how Bellamy knocks. That could be him. She has no idea what to say, what she’s going to do when he comes into the room.

Should she smile? Is smiling going to hurt too much?

Another knock, another patient trio of calls.

Murphy takes his time in opening the door, stepping cautiously over like he’s avoiding creaking floorboards and when he does pull at the handle, a glare of harsh white light makes its way through the room.

It’s only a slither, it’s only enough for him to fit his head through, so Clarke can’t find who is here no matter which angle she leans to.

The wall of synthetic shine pierces and divides the room and Clarke wants it gone.

“Is it a good time?” a voice questions lightly from the other side. But it isn’t him. It’s not Bellamy’s.

“What are you even doing here?” Murphy asks back, and Clarke doesn’t think she imagines both the relief and the disappointment in his tone.

“I’ve come to see her, obviously,”

The man on the other side must be smiling. His voice is rugged and scratchy, grown weary with time.

“She doesn’t even know you,”

“Doesn’t mean she won’t be happy to see me,”

Murphy keeps his arm latched around the door to stop it from opening any further, keeping the gap as small as possible like he’s waiting to slam it into whoever’s face he’s seeing right now.

“Look, if you’re just coming here for recruitment then-”

“Come on Murphy, I saved her life. You gotta let me see her. She doesn’t need her guard dogs anymore,”

The man just sounds really happy, really easy, like everything is a joke. Clarke appreciates the warmth in his voice.

“She woke up eight hours ago. You could at least give her a day,”

There’s silence as the two of them face off, both breathing heavily on either side of the boundary.

Clarke still cranes to see who it is.

“He been here?” rumbles from outside and Clarke freezes, stills in her fidgeting.

“What do you think?” Murphy answers angrily.

Bellamy. They must all know exactly who he is. They must know who he is to her.

There’s a slap on to Murphy’s shoulder: the one that Clarke had to set and reset over and over, and then there’s a decided hum.

“Then I’ll just be a distraction,”

Some shuffling rings out against the door, and then Murphy is pulling the door even tighter closed. His other hand is stretched out of the room, probably raised to stop the incoming visitor.

He thinks for a moment, considers the man, and Clarke tries to school her heart from how it is flipping out. She’d been so sure it would be him. And now all she’s got left is an erratic heart monitor that is telling her how disappointed she is, as if she couldn’t feel that already.

Murphy swings his head back as he pulls the door to a close, letting only a sheet of light through now.

“Clarke,” he says gently. “You’ve got a visitor. You want me to let him in, or shall I send him away?”

 _I saved her life_.

If that’s true then he’s going to be one of two things: he’ll be part of the infamous ‘team’ or he’ll be a doctor. She could use some honesty from either of those.

“Yeah sure,” she says, holding back a yawn. “Let him in,”

There’s a snort on the other side of the door and then the room is being flooded by light. He is only a silhouette for now, but Clarke doesn’t want the lights to go on in her room.

She hasn’t really got a perception of time anymore, so it could be any point in the day, but it still feels like night.

He’s carrying something in his hand, shadowed out.

Murphy stays over by the door as the stranger makes his way into the room, strolling about like he owns the place, shoulders set back and confident.

He makes his whole way around the bed and takes up the stool closest to Clarke’s head on her left and there’s still that glare tearing through the room so she can properly take him in now.

He’s got hair reaching midway down his back, tufts braided and plaited down his head in dreads and he’s wearing a scraggly beard that she would guess hasn’t been taken care of for weeks. There is a sly, thin smile on his face, and it looks like he never enters a room without it, like it’s plastered on his face to stay.

There’s a reptilic nature to it; kind of menacing in a way. She can practically see the cogs turning in his brain, calculating, no matter how emotionless his expression is.

“Hey Angel,”

When he opens his mouth, Clarke’s gaze drops from him and flickers over to Murphy unintentionally. He’s working on keeping the door ajar just a little, just enough the Clarke can see a glimpse out of it.

She’s thankful that he understands she needs to stay in the dark some more. Protected by the shadows.

 _Angel?_ Clarke mouths over to him when he turns his head back and hastens to sit back into his stool.

He just shrugs and rolls his eyes tiredly at the man opposite him.

“Who are you?” she asks when she realizes Murphy isn’t going to say anything.

“Name’s Roan. Pleasure to see you awake,” the man on her left grins, all slimy and friendly and like he’s planning something.

He is already leaning in, hovering over her mattress towards her and Clarke is glad that she’s pressed flush against her pillows.

“I’ll pretend that that doesn’t make you sound like a creep,” she tells him, smirking back twice as much.

“Well that’s the least you could do for your knight in shining armor,”

“My knight?” Clarke echoes, scoffing.

She turns to Murphy again, squirming uncomfortably because she doesn’t know what to do with herself. He must read that on her too, because he leans closer in than Roan is and mumbles.

“Roan got you out of the hospital,”

“Oh,”

“Oh?” the stranger grins sneakily. She must sound disappointed.

“Well I don’t want a knight in shining armor. I don’t need one,”

And that’s true. She never has needed one: she’s never been a damsel in distress. And even if she were, she’s already got her knight. Bellamy will always be the one she would want to look after her.

Roan considers her, takes her in, eyes roaming all over her body, up and down.

“What about a friend? You need one of them?” he tries.

Clarke watches him and can’t quite figure him out. He must sense her hesitation, because he raises his hand slowly.

“I come bearing gifts,”

He extends his palm up flat to the ceiling and at the center of it, resting coolly like it hadn’t been scrunched up in his fist, is a pure white water lily with the petals blossoming all across the flat of his hand.

She can’t help but smile at it. It is kind of beautiful.

“You know, if you’d opened with that, we wouldn’t have had to go through all of this pointless repertoire?”

“Haven’t you heard?” he asks, tone still strangely light as he places the flower into Clarke’s raised hand and holds it there. She doesn’t want him to hold her hand, but he’s holding the flower, in her hand, and that’s not quite the same thing. “Pointless repertoire is step two of my courting masterplan,”

“Courting masterplan?” she barks a laugh, breathlessly and then turns to Murphy who is trying to burn daggers into Roan’s face.

She can see the traces of a smirk starting to weave itself through Murphy’s features.

“He always like this?” she asks, nodding over to her left.

“Yeah,”

“So you’re up?” Roan asks before Clarke can say anything else to Murphy and she has to flick her neck back to watch what he’s doing, his hand still resting on top of hers.

Clarke wriggles it out and uses the switch of the flower over into her other hand as a reason to take both the lily and her hand out of his grasp. Upon closer inspection, it’s even more beautiful. She doesn’t understand how he managed to get it through the base, into her room unscathed.

He’s got this twang to his words, that Clarke recognizes fondly.

“I guess so,” she shrugs, still watching him wearily because he’s still a stranger and a pretty flower doesn’t take that away.

“You’re in pain,”

This one isn’t a question. This is him still studying her, and probably catching every wince she makes each time she moves.

“A little,”

“Where?”

“Um,” Clarke hums, not quite sure what she should answer him with. Roan seems genuinely concerned about her wellbeing, but she has no idea who he actually is. “My head. And… my chest still feels kind of winded,”

She decides to play down the aching through her whole body, because she doesn’t want any false sympathy and this guy might just be a brilliant actor. He seems… impressed if anything at all. He looks away from her eyes, and Clarke takes the break in his scrutiny to breathe again.

“She’s a fighter, huh?” He asks, supposedly to Murphy.

“What?”

“When are they releasing you?” He ignores her question, barreling onward leisurely.

“Roan,” Murphy breaks, his voice a warning and one he’d never use for their family. “You’ve been told to leave her out of it until she’s healed,”

“Yeah, well, Wells is beneath my rank,” Roan counters and smiles at Murphy like they’ve been friends for years.

“We both know who gave you the order. And it wasn’t Wells,”

Wait, who was it then? Who else would care enough? Who else would be able to tell a man like Roan what to do?

 _Recruitment_. That’s what Murphy had said at the door.

“Recruit me for what?” she wonders out loud.

“Huh,” Roan drops his gaze again, back to Clarke’s face, never once stopping on one of her features as he takes her in like he’ll never see her again. He’s got this glazed look in his eyes, always preoccupied with the next ten thoughts he’s going to have to think. “She won’t let you in on any of it?”

“Who? Raven?”

He doesn’t look amused when she asks this time. He loses the chilled out demeanor for just a millisecond but it’s enough for Clarke to notice. His head shoots up to look at Murphy again and he seems outraged.

“You haven’t even told her that-”

“Roan if you’ve just come here to provoke things then you know where the door is,” Murphy growls, not giving him a chance to finish.

The stare each other down for a few moments, and Clarke switches her gaze between the two of them, curious as to who is going to back down first.

Surprisingly, Roan is the one who turns his head back to Clarke, face neutral again.

“So, Angel, anything you want to know?” he asks, kicking back in the stool and leaning on nothing but thin air. “Anything you want to pick my brain about?”

Clarke wants to know if it was Bellamy he was talking about at the door. And if it was, how does he know? Why was he speaking like he knew their whole story? She wants to know what the hell this obscure team is, what the hell ‘recruitment’ even means.

“What’s step one?”

It doesn’t take him half as long as Clarke thought it might for him to understand what she’s referring to.  But his expression doesn’t change, and he still watches her like he knows everything about her.

“Well that’s obvious, isn’t it?” he smirks. “Cute nickname,”

Clarke tries not to think about what the word nickname stirs up inside her.

“Roan,” Murphy spits again, steadily losing his patience.

“Oh come on,” he groans, rolling his head back. “A little harmless flirting never hurt anyone. I’m just preparing you for all of the attention you’re gonna get when you come out of here,”

Her nose scrunches up of its own volition.

“You’re from the south?” Clarke questions instead, because she doesn’t want to think about the attention either.

“Sure am,” he beams back. “Grew up in a small town called Azgeda, Alabama. You’re from New Orleans, right?”

“Yeah,” she nods, and cherishes how she knows she’s from New Orleans. It’s one of the only things she can be sure of right now.

“A woman after my own heart,”

Murphy sighs again and it seems to make Roan realize that they aren’t alone. He throws a wink over at Clarke before he casts his scrutiny back to Murphy.

“So Reyes is out there getting ready to shoot Cage in the knees. Doubt she’ll have to though, I’ve put in a pretty good word for you lot,”

“Good,”

“Who’s Cage?”

Murphy goes to answer her but Roan beats him to it.

“He thinks he runs the place. We’ve got a few commanders here, but the douchebag is pretty adamant that he’s in charge,”

“Commanders?”

“For lack of a better word,”

“Are you one of them?”

“He wishes,” Murphy snorts loudly.

“I’m not. I’ve got too many responsibilities elsewhere,”

“Are people ever going to talk to me like I’m not a fucking mutant?” Clarke snaps when he clearly leaves out every single detail that flashes through his head. “I’ve been living in a place that I know nothing about for four months. I know four walls, three people, and literally nothing else,”

“Woah, I don’t think you’re a mutant,” Roan tells her, and she wonders if she’s imagining the fear that flashes through his eyes. He doesn’t look like the type of guy to be scared of anything. Clarke levels him with a glare until he smirks some more and says, “Plus you’ve got four people now, not three,”

She looks down to the lily in her hand, waits for its perfection to make her feel something. But the soft petals feel like sandpaper to the touch and Clarke doesn’t want it. She knows exactly what she does want, and that’s got something to do with the four dandelions standing tall and cut so that they’ve kept the clouds around their heads.

“But I should have more,” she whispers and then there’s something else in her hand. Another hand, it must be.

They probably both know exactly who she’s referring to, if the way Murphy grips her fingers tightly means anything at all.

Clarke feels them exchanging heated looks over her ducked head, but she doesn’t care.

“Listen, Roan, you seem nice and all but…”

“But it’s time for you to leave,” Murphy finishes and she senses him jerk his head roughly in the direction of the door.

She’s thankful that Roan seems to get the message without much fight. He stands to his feet but hovers awkwardly over the bed like he wants to say more.

“I can drop back in tonight?” he offers quietly, fingers dropping to touch barely at the mattress as though he’s reaching to comfort Clarke.

“It is night?” she shrugs and squirms a little into Murphy some more.

“It’s midday, Clarke,” Murphy tells her quietly, squeezing her hand.

“But it’s dark,”

Why does she sound so weak? She can’t even keep herself together over something as pathetic as the time of day.

“No windows, remember? You were sleeping,”

Roan clears his throat above the two of them awkwardly, still drumming his fingertips against the sheets.

“I’ll head out. Let you get some more rest,”

It takes one clunk of his boot against the tiled floor for Clarke’s mind to flash.

“Wait!” she yells a little too loudly and her spare hand goes flying to stop him from leaving. He turns back upon reflex, spinning around like he hasn’t really even thought about it.

“What is it?”

“You, you said you saved my life?”

He looks subtly to the stool he’d been sat on and Clarke follows his glance to read the unspoken question.

“If you stay, will you answer my questions?”

He smiles tepidly, still wearing such neutrality that it would piss anyone normal off.

“Clarke maybe you should just get some sleep,” Murphy tries, but she can already see the smugness worming itself into Roan’s face and she knows she’s won.

“I’m not going to be in the dark anymore, Murphy,” she says. She probably doesn’t mean it literally, in fact she doesn’t because she’s still so tired and would so much rather just go back to sleep for a while in the blanket of night, but this is what she needs. Just needs some answers.

Roan takes it literally, because he dawdles over to the light switches on the other end of the room and flicks at it randomly, so half the room becomes flooded and the other half stays dimmed.

Reclaiming his seat patiently, he braces Clarke with a look.

“What do you want to know?”

“Where’s the best place to start?” she asks instead of answering his question, because she wants to know everything.

“The hospital,” he decides. “It’ll be better to just go chronologically,”

Murphy shifts uncomfortably next to her and Clarke notices him flicker his gaze over to the door like he’s waiting for someone to burst in and stop Roan from doing whatever he’s about to do.

“We get sent out on rekkies. That’s pretty much our job,”

“The team?”

“Yeah, we call ourselves the Ark,”

Clarke snorts helplessly, rolling her eyes over at Murphy who is playing with his fingers sullenly.

“Biblical?”

“Kind of works though,” Roan shrugs, the white of his eyes glinting in agreement. “It might be a bit pretentious,”

“You were literally the one who thought of the name,” Murphy scoffs.

“I’m not denying that,”

“Rekkies for what?”

“Everything. Food, medicine, weapons… people. My team are the ones who leave this place; no one else is allowed to get out. We realized pretty soon in that we’d have to monitor who’s coming in and out as heavily as we could,”

“You remember the big fuck off gates?” Murphy asks Clarke, nudging her thigh and shuffling in a little more so that he can contribute what he needs to.

She remembers him mentioning them before she’d fallen asleep but can’t picture them for the life of her.

“Roan’s like the gatekeeper around here,”

“So what do you actually do?” Clarke wonders, pushing herself up some more so she stays awake.

“Me personally?” Roan smiles warmly.

“Yeah,”

“I’m King of the Ark,”

Murphy scoffs again; Clarke guesses he must draw that kind of reaction with most things he says.

“Sorry, I don’t speak bullshit,”

“He’s not technically wrong,” Murphy says, smirking oddly. “He leads the team: he keeps us all in check, gives us our assignments, makes sure no one gets left behind,”

“So you are part of it?”

“We all are,”

“You guys all came in like something from a lab. The number of people here who can actually fight is pathetic. Your lot… it’s like having the x-men around,”

“Thought you didn’t look at me like I’m a mutant?” Clarke smiles.

He sucks in sharply through his teeth and grins, shrugging unapologetically to tell her that the game is up.

“Heard you’re pretty handy with a bow,”

“Roan,” Murphy growls, another warning not to go too far.

Clarke looks between the two of them worriedly and something clicks in her head: Roan wants her to join the Ark.

“I don’t know how well I shoot anymore,” she tells him quietly, just so that he knows not to get his hopes up. “I might be useless.”

“They say you’re a natural- I doubt that’s gonna go away so suddenly,”

“Dude she’s been unconscious for four months. You gotta give her some time to get used to it again,”

“When you say you’re all part of it…” Clarke trails off, wanting to know who Murphy considers to be ‘all’ of them.

“Raven and Wells are too, yeah,”

“But Wells can’t fight?” she asks. As a kid, Clarke had always begged him to go hunting with her and Raven and her father, but he couldn’t stand it. Said he found it boring.

“No, he’s one of the fittest medics we have though,” Roan offers, shrugging.

So it’s dangerous then. It’s taxing. Clarke doesn’t think she’d be able to do any other job though, not here. As much as she’s been looking forward to sanctity, this room has started to feel claustrophobic after mere hours. She’s going to need to get out of here eventually.

“Why wouldn’t you guys tell me about this?”

“Because we all knew how you’d react to it. We both know that you know exactly what you’re going to do once you get out of here,” Murphy tells her, unimpressed but resigned to it.

Yeah, but if it were that clear then why would they even bother hiding it? Obviously she’s going to join the Ark.

“How many of you are there?”

“Before you guys, a dozen… give or take. I have to admit it’s not the easiest thing to do. We’ve lost quite a few of us,”

If they’re the front line soldiers, then of course there’s going to be more risks out there. He’s merely letting her know how hard it can get. If anyone knows about that, it’s going to be Clarke. She did die, after all.

Clarke looks over to Murphy tepidly and he isn’t quite meeting her eye.

“You’re leaving something out again,” she mumbles, reaching for the lily so that she can cradle it between her fingers again. It looks strangely empty. “You’re leaving him out.”

“How much does she know about him?”

“I am here,” Clarke snaps to Roan’s hushed question. “I can hear you. And I’m not going to shatter if you say his name.”

“Fine. How much do you know about Bellamy?”

His voice is cautious, sympathetic in a way that makes her want to throw up.

“They said he’s changed. Said he hasn’t come to see me yet,”

Yet. Because there is always tomorrow.

“And that’s all?” Roan asks Murphy warily.

“That’s all, yeah,”

He turns back to Clarke and leans in closer, a hand coming to rest featherlight on top of her thigh in reassurance.

“He’s part of the team, both of them,”

“Octavia too?”

“Girl’s a fucking menace. She’s fire when she gets out there,”

“They both are,” Clarke hums and shoves away the emotion that threatens to seep through with the words, hoping whatever drugs they’re giving her to numb the pain will work on hurt like this too.

That’s the thing about the Blake siblings: they are both made of fire, pure and never wilting.

“Clarke you don’t have to-”

“Murphy what happened to them?”

Because _something_ happened. She knows something happened; they wouldn’t just leave her, they really wouldn’t. Something happened to make it so both Murphy and Raven talk about them like they aren’t even a part of the family anymore.

He braces Clarke with melted eyes that aren’t quite there in the shadows and he opens his mouth to say anything but the door- having been stuck ajar- flies open wildly, slamming against the wall with all the noise of thunder and her eyes jerk towards it.

There is a boy standing in the gaping doorway, his silhouette all lanky and awkward, completely the opposite to Roan who definitely has the build of a soldier, muscles rippling through arms as thick as tree trunks.

His hair reminds Clarke of the kind a mad scientist might have when they were younger: probably chocolate brown and each chunk extending in random directions. She thinks he’s wearing something on his head: glasses or… lab goggles?

“Roan!” He barrels forward, sounding winded like he’s run the whole way here. His gaze flickers around the room and catches on the lights that have been left on in patches like spotlights. He seems confused that some of them are off: that is, until his eyes fall to rest on Clarke and blow even wider, comically wide as though they might pop out of his head.

Whatever thought the boy, surely no older than twenty, had before he came sprinting into the room has dissipated once he’s crossed that boundary.

“Woah,” he hums as he stumbles over to the corner of the bed to get a better look at Clarke.

She squirms instantly under his study, understanding now what Roan meant by ‘attention’.

“She’s awake?”

His mouth is hanging open and limp, not even trying to hide his surprise.

“And you are?” Clarke hears herself ask him, gripping on to Murphy’s fingers tightly.

“Oh,” he stutters and drops his gaze down to his hands like he’s expecting them to do something. In the next couple of seconds, he seems to realize what they’re meant to be doing, and he extends one hand out to her, ready to be taken. “I’m Jasper.”

When he smiles at Clarke, and leans awkwardly, way too far, over her mattress, she really starts to understand the true definition of goofball.

“Clarke,” she says warily, taking her hand back from Murphy’s so she can give it to the boy to shake.

“She’s awake,” he whispers again, tearing his eyes away from her and nodding to Murphy like he can’t see Clarke.

“I’m aware,” Murphy says dryly, and Clarke smirks inwardly because this guy is definitely not Murphy’s type of person. Not at all, if the way he grimaces at Jasper is anything to go by.

“You woke up?”

“I think so,” she grins.

He’s practically shaking, bubbling over with something Clarke hopes is only as harmless as excitement but watching something else dawn over his expression so slowly that it should be like something out of Tom and Jerry, is pretty entertaining.

That is, until his eyebrows turn down and his smile disappears, confusedly.

“This is why,”

“Why what?” Murphy asks impatiently, staring daggers at the door to hint to the boy that he’s not welcome.

He shakes his head out, and it seems to light something from under his feet because he jumps to attention and hurries forward towards Roan and starts to tug at his arm.

“There’s a situation in the mess,” Jasper rushes, leaning all of his weight to try to get Roan up off of the stool but the bigger man doesn’t budge, just looks unimpressed and like he’s got all the time in the world to make his way up. “No one can break it up.”

“Break what up?” Murphy rises to his feet slowly, but his voice sounds like it knows exactly what Jasper is going to say.

His fist is already clenched, and he holds it tightly in his other one, preparing himself for something, and Clarke notices the redness all over his knuckles.

Jasper flicks his eyes briefly to Clarke, just enough to let her know that he doesn’t think she should know what’s going on.

“Roan, you really need to come with me,” he starts to plead and sends an apologetic glance over to the other two.

Murphy dithers between the bed and the door, like he wants to go and see what’s happening but knows he would rather stay with Clarke.

“It’s okay,” Roan assures calmly, in a way that makes Clarke smile because his response to panic is quite admirable really. “I’ll take care of it. You stay here,”

They don’t wait much longer in the room. It takes just a slap to Murphy’s shoulder, and a whispered promise to Clarke that he’ll be back, and Roan is following the manic boy out of her room at a heightened pace.

“You should go,” Clarke tells him when she notices he’s still hesitating. “You don’t have to be here all the time anymore. I think I’ll be okay for five minutes,”

Murphy shakes his head reluctantly, but his gaze is trained on the gaping doorway.

“I’m not just going to leave you,” he mumbles, sounding guilty even if he hasn’t done anything yet.

“I can just go back to sleep, Murphy. They might need you,”

It’s now, in the glow of the corridors alight with unknown frenzy, that it sinks in for Clarke how much the last few months really must have taken a toll on them. If he’s this hesitant, this uncertain about leaving Clarke on her own for just a moment, then whatever she became, and that space of time must have been awful.

“Go, please,”

He needs to go even if he doesn’t quite realize it for himself yet. They’ll need to break the close contact eventually, and this might just have to be the way they’ve got to do it.

He nods his head once; shrugs the jacket he’s wearing off of his shoulders and swings it over his stool like it’s going to be his reminder for her that he’s going to come back.

“I’ll be ten minutes,” he tells her, hand gripping her forearm as a promise.

She smiles weakly back and nods her head a couple of times in the laziest way she can manage because even saying the word ‘sleep’ makes the fatigue hit her instantly.

“Ten minutes, Griffin,”

“I’m fine, moron,” Clarke laughs and feels something soft and delicate still tingling at her hand. She grips at the lily, cups it unnaturally and waits for Murphy to jog his way from the room until she closes her eyes.

Clarke watches as the light fades from the room, the switch flicking as he brushes past, and door swinging shut so that the latch clicks solidly. She’s left in darkness, only guided by the neon numbers on monitors all around her head, but she doesn’t need them right now because the tiredness comes back over her like a wave once more.

Sleep reaches for Clarke with open fingers that look too bony to be warm. Everything feels colder after Murphy leaves, and she has to guess that this is the first time that she’s been left alone for… as long as she can remember?

She still has no fucking clue what happened with Bellamy. Her mind is still reeling with all of the unanswered and half-answered questions that they might not ever have the time for. Why is Murphy all bruised up? Why are Wells’ knuckles torn? Why does Roan think she needs a distraction?

Clarke doesn’t know if she ever makes it to a state of sleep; it’s more like she just lies there on pillows that are both softer and harder than what she’s used to. Softer because her pack was lumpy and left a crook in her neck that is probably still there, but harder because Bellamy’s chest had become her favorite place to rest.

She tries to remember the clouds that lived in his shoulder, the silk of his shirt under her ear, but the memory feels so distant and the darkness is overwhelming.

Numb really doesn’t feel like numb, Clarke decides when ten minutes has definitely passed, and Murphy still hasn’t come back. Her heart feels like it has been iced over.

An hour must drift by before anything happens, anything apart from the tangible beeping of her heart attachment filling the room. Her eyes stay shut the whole time, not quite ready to see the proof that she’s alone.

No, it’s only when Clarke feels something cut at her eyelids that she stops pretending to be asleep. It’s just light, that’s all there is slicing through her, but Murphy was sure to close the door, so it fit snugly into its hold.

There shouldn’t be any light coming from the doorway at all, but from the way it is forming a long thin beam against her face, Clarke knows that it has been opened by just a slither.

Her eyes don’t open all the way, but enough that she can see hazily through her own tiredness. Enough that she can track the silhouette blocking the rest of the light from seeping into her room, the one tucked in the small crack between the door and the wall.

She might be dreaming. Being alone for the first time, in the dark and surrounded by the calls of sleep, might have made her slightly delusional. Maybe trying to imagine Bellamy lying next to her has caused him to drift into her unconscious mind.

But Clarke recognizes the shadowed mop of hair that outlines the head of the silhouette, even if it is a little longer than she’s used to. Clarke is familiar with the way this man holds himself, head ducked when no one is looking because his brain is too busy travelling at a hundred miles an hour.

She can’t see his face because there’s no light shining on it, but she doesn’t have to in order for Clarke to know what she’s seeing.

She’s seeing him. Dithering in that tiny amount of space that’s shutting them away from each other like he knows he should be running away.

Clarke wants to call for him but knows that she can’t because his figure looks so on the edge of leaving that if she makes any sort of movement to reach out, then he’ll be gone quicker than she can say his name. Quicker than she can actually get a glimpse of his face.

She wonders if he knows she’s awake. If he wants her to be awake to see him.

Clarke wonders if he knows that he’s even here, if he knows what he’s going to do.

She might not be able to see his face, or any of the expressions he may be pulling, but she can see the way his hand is hanging from his neck in that oh so Bellamy way.

This might be a dream but right now, in this small moment of the witching hour, Clarke doesn’t care if it is. If this really is just a figment of her imagination, then she’ll count herself lucky to have been able to think up something as charged, as magnetic as this.

The heart monitor is still beeping away, the IV is still pumping almost dangerous concentrations of drugs- ones that she still needs to identify for herself- into her bloodstream, and the marshmallows under her head are only getting lighter.

But she can sense his gaze heavy over her bed frame and it feels an awful lot like he’s learning her all over again, like he’s trying to memorize every part of her, and it lets Clarke know that he won’t be sticking around for much longer.

There are so many questions on the tip of her tongue, too many because she can’t decide on any of them. None of them are going to be good enough to ask him right now.

There is nothing to do, other than sit here and wait for him to make his mind up.

He’s still got one hand on the door handle; the other one on the outside of the room like he’s getting ready to pull it shut, to seal it tightly between the two of them, like he’s preparing himself to throw away the key.

There must be a thousand things tunneling through his mind. And right now, Clarke can’t find it in herself to feel anything at all.

It’s like she’s a statue, like she’s something carved out of marble, something passive and only made for the eyes of others, and she isn’t capable of doing anything, feeling anything towards her observers.

She doesn’t know why she would have been angry; doesn’t know why she would have wanted to see him before this. Everything runs away in the time it has taken to crack just one of her eyes open the slightest bit.

The only things she can bear to think about are the plain and simple facts and nothing more. She’s tucked up in a hospital gown only meters away from Bellamy, pretending to be asleep for reasons much too buried in the haze of factors she can’t name. And he’s watching her with so much focus that Clarke would guess he’s willing her to do something. Willing her to send him away because maybe he isn’t strong enough to leave on his own.

_Where’ve you been, Bell?_

_Who have you become?_

He still looks like the man she knew before, or at least the very few parts of him that Clarke can see. She can’t notice anything particularly… different.

She wonders if his voice has grown any different, if his smile has twisted to the side any more, if his laugh is still seismic.

But the distance between them makes all of those questions feel irrelevant. This distance has turned him into any other visitor. This distance has turned four months into a lifetime. This distance has turned Bellamy Blake into a stranger.

And when he closes the door, when he finalizes that mysterious divide between the two of them, Clarke feels every part of her body relax back into itself, and if that isn’t enough for her to know that whatever has gone on between them is something detrimental, then the slowing of the heart monitor screams it out for her transparently.

When the clicking of the latch into the wall is the only other sound to ring out through the room, she realizes that finding Bellamy is going to be a lot harder than just running around the base to look for him.

Because maybe he isn’t here like they think he is. Maybe he never really was.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Oh roses, they don't mean a thing,'  
> \- Wild Roses, Of Monsters and Men


	22. Sheltered as you took my heart

“What the fuck happened to you?”

For the first time in months, waking up doesn’t come slowly to Clarke. It isn’t something that seeps into her mind and rubs her back until she is able to pull her fragile frame up from the marshmallow. Waking up hits her like a truck and the image of Wells’ face all bruised and bloodied doesn’t bring with it any warning or preparation.

He’s slumped over her mattress, elbows pinned to it with his head thrown back and a wad of tissue pressed tightly to his nose. Even with the eye she can see all purple and blue underneath it, Clarke can still tell that he’s rolling his eyes, brushing her off instantly.

“I’m fine, Clarke,” he sighs like he’s been waiting for this.

The choked laugh that rings from her mouth is strange, but she lets it go anyway as she heaves herself upright and grabs at his neck to get a better look.

“You call this fine?”

Upon closer inspection, Clarke sees that his face isn’t as ruined as it might have looked from a bit further away. But his nose is definitely broken, and it has marred the rest of it to make it look a lot worse.

“I call this,” he shrugs, gesturing casually over Clarke’s grasp when he takes his fingers away from the tissue hanging from his nose. “An overreaction.”

As Wells tugs himself from her grip, her fingers fly to the corners of the blanket that has been tucked under the bed, and she is wrenching them away from her body before he can stop her.

“Who did this to you?” Clarke demands once she’s thrown the covers away.

His hand is on her arm, pulling her back to the center of the bed in the next second and Clarke thumps back against the pillows with a loud groan.

“Wells who the hell would do this to you?”

“Leave it, Clarke. It doesn’t even hurt that much,”

He goes back to pinching at the bridge of his nose and leaning his head back on the stool. It doesn’t have a back to it though and looks much too uncomfortable for someone who has just been through something like whatever Wells has been through, to have to sit on.

Knowing that he isn’t going to let Clarke leave the bed, let alone the room, she decides instead that she isn’t going to be able to help him from so far away. Clarke shuffles towards all of the cables, all of the monitors at her bedside and when he still doesn’t get the message, she is forced to pat the empty space next to her, urging Wells to take the admittedly much comfier seat on her left.

He makes a tutting sound with his lips but stands himself strongly to his feet and doesn’t really hesitate before he leans down over the bed and throws an arm over Clarke’s shoulder so that they can both fit on to it much more easily.

She cranes her head, turns her neck awkwardly as they fight over where she should be resting: him wanting her to just relax and slump against his shoulder, but Clarke needing to see the state in which he’s allowed his face to become.

“Who did it Wells?”

“It’s late Clarke,” he tightens his hold around her shoulders, pulling her into him even further. “You should keep sleeping.”

“All you do is let me sleep,” Clarke sulks back, nuzzling the tip of her head into his neck.

“Well it’s that or sit here and let you gripe at me all day long, and only one of those things is going to get you back on your feet,”

“I heard griping was step one on the way to recovery,”

She shrugs her shoulders relentlessly.

“It’s a wonder they ever let you in to that shitty med school,”

“Sorry, Jaha, but I don’t exactly see your license to practice medicine anywhere around here either,”

“That’s because they’re framing it as we speak,”

“You can’t be serious,” Clarke shoots her head up, looking him head-on to read his expression.

His bruised up face gives nothing away and he meets her stare down defiantly, as he always has.

“They’ve got a shortage of doctors in this place,” he nods, an eyebrow raised like Clarke should be the one under examination. “It was a courtesy to make it official,”

She knows they’re not actually going to the effort to give him a framed certificate or anything; he must mean it more in the allegorical sense. As in, ‘they call me Dr. Jaha now’.

“And there I was thinking we’d be failures together,” she mumbles and rolls her eyes at the thought of him actually becoming a doctor. “You’ve always got to one up me, huh?”

“Always,” he chuckles into her ear. “There’s room for you though, on the med ward. Whenever you want it,”

“I know about the team, Wells. I know about the Ark”

It feels like careers might be a big deal around here. Maybe that’s just the short-term replacement for the lives people must have had before all of this. Professions have turned into survival; there will be no more room for accountants, for artists… for writers.

“Roan got to you before I could,” he sighs, clearly knowing the game is up.

“I like Roan. He seems like the kind of guy you’d never get bored of,”

“Try spending a week with him in the trenches,”

“The trenches?”

“Our missions… they aren’t all national parks and highways,” Wells mutters, his voice filled with mirth.

“You know what I’m going to do, right?” Clarke asks him, hand coming to rest over his chest because that seems to be the place it is drifting towards anyway.

“I knew you’d join the second they told _me_ about it,”

“You had that much faith that I’d get here?”

“Why do you think I’m still here, Clarke?” he wonders, deadpanned and blunt. “I knew the only chance of getting you back would be to wait for you to find me. That’s how we’ve always worked,”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,”

She knows he’s got authority here. She hears it in the way people talk about him. And you don’t get that way through complacency.

“If they’ve got you on the med ward and on the Ark then they know that they need you in order to keep the place running,”

“Ah, they don’t need me,” he muses, and Clarke doesn’t need to see him to know that he’s got his head laid back on the pillows, looking up to the ceiling. “I’m just… selfish I guess,”

“You’re gonna have to explain yourself a little more than that,” Clarke scoffs, kicking him through the sheets because Wells would never be selfish.

“It gives me something to do. Being busy is what keeps me going,”

“That’s nothing new,”

“No, but things are different now,”

Clarke sighs again.

“Why do I feel like life was a lot simpler on the road?” she asks, because in all honesty, although their time spent out in the cold, in the harsh conditions and in a state of such forced independence, was a nightmare, Clarke has a feeling that what is next to come is going to be a whole lot tougher.

“Because it was,” Wells affirms, not sounding too happy about it either.

“Am I ever going to stop feeling so tired?”

She doesn’t feel pain as much today. Her bones aren’t as sore and her skin isn’t as sensitive but there is still this ache, this unrelenting ache tingling everywhere that beckons her for sleep. More and more and more sleep.

“You will, Clarke. Remember I told you: it’s just going to take some time. But we’re going to get you through it,”

Wells leans his head even more on to Clarke’s head as they both look to the door, blank and white, shut snugly into its frame.

“What happened to your face, Wells?” she asks after a while of nothing but beeping, beeping that doesn’t really sound like a heart the more you listen to it, the closer you try to hear the rhythms. “I know I might not be in the right state to beat someone up but I’m sure I could give them some sort of-”

“Clarke, there’s nothing to do,” he rushes through a loud exhale, breaking her ramble like he can’t stand it. “It was my fault,”

“How could it be your fault? Who on Earth would want to hit you?”

She can’t imagine there being a single situation in which it would involve someone being angry enough to hurt Wells Jaha so violently. It just doesn’t add up.

“It’s okay Clarke. I threw the first punch, I had it coming,”

“You did what?”

He hesitates again, looks like he’s trying to figure out a way to explain himself without actually explaining himself.

Wells has never been a fighter. Wells was the man that Clarke could count on to keep his head through everything. He was always the calming presence that could talk her and Raven down from whatever rampage they were planning next.

“Wells, what’s going on? What is so bad that you won’t even talk to me about it? It is _me_ , Wells,” she tries, because maybe it hasn’t sunk in for him just as much as it hasn’t sunk in for her.

It’s been at least a year since they’ve seen each other, but after everything that has happened, Clarke and Wells are a lifetime apart. They are best friends; they’ve always been best friends. She hopes that that isn’t going to change for the future, but it might take some time to get back to where they were.

“I know it’s you, Clarke. That’s why I shouldn’t tell you,”

“You used to tell me everything,”

“I know you well enough to know that you aren’t going to like what I did,”

“And that’s never stopped you before,”

The next time Clarke looks at him, Wells is wearing this wince all over his face and she hopes he’s done whatever he has needed to do to set his nose because otherwise he’s going to be left with a nasty scar that won’t fade any time soon.

“It was Octavia Blake,” he gives in after some more continued silence, his voice tired.

“O?”

It’s not the first time that Clarke has heard someone talk about the younger Blake sibling, but each reference to her makes her heart stop a little. She keeps expecting to see that head of chocolate brown catwalk-worthy hair whenever she looks over to the door of her room. But the name is still just a name, still just a legend.

The panic in her voice must give him cause to startle.

“I didn’t hit her, Jesus Clarke I’m not that much of a prat,” Wells grimaces, still rolling his eyes. “I just… I saw red and I couldn’t just sit there and watch him-”

“Watch who?” She interrupts, not because she needs an answer to the question- she already knows exactly who Wells is talking about- but because hearing his name spoken aloud by anyone else feels a lot like relief. It’s a reminder that he’s not just a phantom. He’s not just a dream.

She sits up properly on the bed, winces under the fluorescence that floods the room, and folds herself up so that she can cross her legs and face him head on.

“You want to hear everything right?” Wells asks wearily, an eyebrow raised crooked nearly scraping his hairline in suspicion. “Rip the bandaid off?”

And Clarke nods because she can’t take all of this waiting anymore.

“Raven went to go and find Bellamy to see if he’d come and see you but…”

“But he didn’t want to?”

“No, Clarke, he didn’t want to,” he says soberly. “And they’ve all told me about how close the two of you were out there so I just couldn’t understand what is going through his head,”

“Have you spoken to him much?” Clarke asks, gaze dropping to the fingers that are intertwining themselves in her lap. Wells seems to sense her nervousness, because he takes her hand in his own and gives it a reassuring squeeze to let her know that she isn’t alone.

“No. I gave him a wide berth the second I learnt who he is,”

“But you don’t know who he is,”

“Clarke,” he whispers. “I don’t think you do either, anymore.”

“What happened Wells?” Clarke pleads, letting her eyes drift closed so that she can’t see the emotion in his weary expression.

“I went to go and see what he’s playing at, but I guess I didn’t… I couldn’t keep my head as well as I thought I might,”

“What happened?” she feels herself ask for the hundredth time.

“I hit him,” when he admits it, Clarke can’t hear an ounce of regret in his voice. “A lot. Octavia kicked me in the face to separate us, which was probably for the best if I’m being honest,”

Wells would never hit anybody when she knew him. A fist fight would always be meaningless in comparison to the way he could talk someone down.

“You fought with him?” she scrunches up her forehead.

“I wouldn’t call it a fight. He wouldn’t hit me back, he just fucking laid there and took it and it only made me angrier.”

Clarke squeezes his hand when the snarl escapes his face.

“Is he… okay?” it feels pathetic to ask, it really does.

Right now, Bellamy feels like the most important piece to the puzzle of what she is, but Clarke doesn’t know what that puzzle is meant to look like once it’s finished, and so there’s no hope for finding him.

But if it took the two closest people to her life to try to convince him to at least come and see her, and it took both of them to fail, then maybe what they’re saying is right: maybe he has changed.

If only they could just have a conversation. If only he could come and see that she’s alive then this could all still be written up to be just a misunderstanding. He could have just lost himself. She still doesn’t even know what drove him away in the first place.

It’s got to be something more than Clarke’s death. If it were her death, then he’d be here now.

It sinks in slowly: painfully, like a tumor.

Her and Raven weren’t the only people looking for someone. Bellamy and Octavia had a drive to get to Vancouver too, and while the former pair found the missing part of their team, that doesn’t mean the siblings did too.

“Wells, they were looking for their Mom. Aurora Blake?”

The name feels strange on Clarke’s tongue, like it shouldn’t be there at all.

Wells’ eyebrow only lifts itself higher and his expression says everything, rendering the English language useless. Still, maybe because he knows she’s only just woken up from a forever of being unconscious, he shakes his head gently and opens his mouth.

“She was here,”

Was. She’s not anymore.

“They lost their mom,”

It’s not a question when she nods her head, but Wells whispers a confirmation, nonetheless.

Here he is. Here’s that gentleness, the calm that she remembers from him.

“Did you hurt him?”

“I think he blacked out for a couple seconds, but he didn’t go to the med ward,”

For how much they preach about him having changed, that sounds an awful lot like her Bellamy Blake.

“Okay,”

Clarke doesn’t know what else she should say. She settles back into his waiting arm and turns to face the door again, snuggling up to his chest.

“So let me get this straight: he hasn’t been to visit me at all, and he doesn’t care that I’m awake now?”

“Seems to look that way,” Wells hums.

But that doesn’t make sense.

Dandelions aren’t a flower.

Nobody would pick them for a stranger. Roses, sure. Lilies, sure. But dandelions are a weed and there are four of them held weakly in a glass vase hidden away at the back of the display, like they don’t want to be seen at all.

If they are nothing else, then they are at least a peace offering. There was a night filled with dislocations, warm squirrel, and apologies that Clarke won’t be forgetting any time soon.

“You said you’ve been here the entire time?”

“The three of us have, always,”

It’s Clarke’s turn to hum, to try to add things up but that’s not going to happen while she’s in a hospital bed.

“You like Murphy?” she decides to ask instead, needing a break from trying to figure Bellamy out while she’s got no information. “He mentioned you’re living together,”

“Like is a very strong word,”

The huff he makes, makes Clarke grin despite everything else. And then she gets hit in the face by _another_ thing she’s missed.

“Oh my God!” she all but shouts and slaps him in the shoulder before he has time to ask her what she’s panicking about now. “You and Raven!”

The last time Clarke remembers seeing Raven, she’d been subtly snuggling up to Murphy the night before. But only a few days prior to that, she’d been worrying about the time she lost with Wells.

Vancouver had been the promise. It was the offer that she could think about all of this once she was in a safe place. Well they’ve been in a safe place for four months too long for nothing to have happened between the three of them.

Murphy hadn’t given anything at all away when Clarke asked about Wells. Said he thought he was a good guy. But everyone is ‘good’ in comparison to Murphy.

Wells gives nothing away. He keeps his face completely set and doesn’t quite meet Clarke’s scrutinizing gaze.

“What about us?” he asks, feigning ignorance, and innocence, and everything else that tells Clarke he’s putting a guard up.

“You told her you were in love with her, you prat! Why the fuck did I have to hear about this like six years too late?”

“Because it was a mistake,” he shrugs back and looks to the furthest corner of the room, watching it like spiders are about to spring from the plaster. “We both agreed it was wrong.”

If there is one thing Clarke is tired of, it is people describing love as wrong. She’s had to hear it too many times and it’s just not true.

“But you were in love with her,”

“Love like that is dangerous now, Clarke. I’m not sure I can afford that,”

He might be trying to keep his voice steady, but that doesn’t stop him from sounding saddened by the admission.

Is this what she sounded like? Is this what she was saying when she refused to give in to her own feelings?

“What’s she said about it all?”

“I’ll be honest, Clarke, you dying over and over kept us pretty preoccupied. Me and her haven’t had any sort of conversation like that which is probably for the best because I don’t know what I’d say if we did,”

She makes a mental note to interrogate Raven about this the next time she sees her. Clarke hasn’t been able to talk to Raven ever since she woke up, but there will be time for all of this soon enough.

“We’re family at the end of the day. Us three will always be a family,”

“Tweedle dee, tweedle dum and tweedle don’t,”

“Exactly,” he laughs. “Me and her might just be ships in the night,”

“As long as you’re heading towards the same… lighthouse”

“That’s oddly poetic?”

Is it? Is that what she’s turned into? Is she a poet now?

Clarke doesn’t have to ponder it for long before she remembers whose influence has given her that.

“You’re right. We’re a family. That means you’ll still have each other no matter what, right?”

“Right. I’m not blind, Clarke,”

“What do you mean?”

“I know how to read people. Murphy and Raven might have learned how to put emotion to the back of their minds but it’s pretty hard to ignore them two,”

“What have they done?”

Clarke doesn’t think that either of them would be doing anything to rub what they have in Wells’ face, that is, if they have anything at all anymore. When it was the three of them together with her, they seemed to be functioning as one. There was no tension, no jealousy between any of them.

“I don’t know, I guess there are little things that give them away. I don’t think they even realize what they do half the time. She’ll make him wear his jumper whenever it’s cold at night, or he’ll grab her some water when she doesn’t want to leave you. It’s all very… domestic,”

Wells doesn’t sound jealous now either. It’s just like he’s been casually observing how the two of them move around each other, like he’s more interested than anything else.

She doesn’t want him to give up with Raven. Both him and Murphy have given the girl things that no one else could give her, and so Clarke isn’t going to choose a side with this. It isn’t her place to involve herself. But Wells shouldn’t be stepping back so soon.

He may not have ever been a fighter, but he’s always been driven at least.

“That’s what we all were though,” Clarke argues because she is worried that no one has told him the full extent of the bond that the five of them formed out on the road. “We had to look after each other. That isn’t going to go away any less than the way it feels natural for me, you and Raven to fall back into that same New Orleans rampage,”

“Did Bellamy look after you like that?”

Bellamy looked after her in ways Clarke will never be able to put into words. And she looked after him just as much. They had a bubble within another bubble.

“Why are you asking me that?” Clarke begs, squeezing her eyes shut tightly because it hurts too much to even think of answering.

“Because you all say these things, you all talk about that man like he was good, but I’ve seen nothing like that from him. I want to know the person who made you happy. That’s what they told me; they said he made you happy but I just-”

“He did make me happy,”

All of this past tense is really starting to make the lump in her throat unbearable.

“I’m really trying to find that part of him. I’m trying to find something that will make me hate him less,”

“You hate him?”

“I hate what he’s done,”

And maybe, if someone had left Wells like this instead, if the roles were reversed, Clarke would hate that person too.

“I hate that he left you,”

 _He left me_. But he could still come back, surely.

“I hate that he hurt you,”

Has he hurt her? She hasn’t been able to figure it out that much, she really hasn’t. Maybe if she just sees him, Clarke might be able to work out whether or not she’s been wounded by this.

In all honesty, it still hasn’t sunk in that Bellamy isn’t by her side. Clarke doesn’t know if it will ever become reality for her.

“And from him, from his mouth, that’s all I know. So yeah, I hate him,”

But Wells doesn’t hate anyone, and he never has hated anyone.

Hate sounds so final, so unforgiving and so empty. Maybe that word alone is what makes Clarke realize that Bellamy definitely, certainly, without a shadow of a doubt, is not here. And it isn’t even the matter of him not being here, it’s the fact that he isn’t tearing his way through the halls to get to her now that she’s awake, like she was so confident he would be.

He’s somewhere else, probably ignoring bruises that her own brother has given him, and he will be in that other place, the place that is nowhere near where Clarke is, and he isn’t bothered, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to know how Clarke is doing, or how she will be doing.

There is a rock in the pit of her stomach that wasn’t there ten minutes ago. She cuddles further into Wells’ hold but it doesn’t take the rock away like she thought it might because he may be her brother, but he isn’t the man that she has come to rely on through everything else.

 

…

 

“Okay Angel,”

He doesn’t even bother knocking as he barges in now and Clarke jumps to sit upright to shush him.

Her and Wells must have fallen asleep at some point earlier- her still having no reception of time- but when he swings the door open, the lights are still on outside. Maybe they never get turned off.

“I’ve got an hour,”

She’s shushing him before he can move any further into the room and he’s tugging something along behind him, not without difficulty, but he stops still in his tracks when she lurches forward.

Wells’ head, which had been slumped on to hers, falls down and he ends up leaning as awkwardly as possible with the tip of his head on the mattress, still snoring soundly.

“Go away,” she whispers harshly, throwing her hands in a shooing motion so that the rattling of whatever he’s brought with him ceases.

“Can’t. You’ll like this,” he says back. At least he’s considerate enough to lower his voice.

Roan shuffles some more into the room and when he makes it all the way inside, along with the contraption that won’t stop fucking clinking, he holds it up like a trophy.

It looks like the frame of a folded up pushchair.

“Fancy a tour?”

“A what?” Clarke asks, scrubbing at her eyes sleepily.

“It’s time for you to get out of this shitty hole in the wall,” Roan answers, stretching his arms out, revealing acres of taut muscle, as he unfolds the frame and sets it down on the tiled floor.

It isn’t a kid’s pram like she thought it might be: it’s a wheelchair, old and rickety like it hasn’t been used in years. It doesn’t even have a proper back to it, just a sheet of leather tethered to either metal pole.

“I’m not leaving my drugs,” she crosses her arms over her chest and waits for him to wipe that smug smirk off his face just because he thinks he’s already won this one. She gestures down to her forearm, points to the needle hanging out from punctured skin.

“You don’t have to,”

He’s already striding over to the frame that holds her miracle cocktail, the clear liter pumping all the way into her bloodstream. He’s lifted a pole up from the wheelchair, so that it is suspended above where a patient would sit, and he starts to move to attach the bag to it.

Before he goes too far though, Roan seems to realize that she is still all connected up and he almost yanks the tubes out of her arm in his rush.

“Watch it,” Clarke scowls and leans forward to avoid making the scab that she created any worse.

“Well come on then, Angel,” he sighs back.

He doesn’t seem to be in a mood to wait around and he starts to walk towards the chair at a slower pace and forces Clarke to crawl along the length of the bed with him.

She’s forgotten that she’s in a hospital gown and that there are jelly like pads wired up to her chest to give the signals of her heart to a computer. It’s time to take them off though; she wants her heart back for herself.

So Clarke peels them away and listens, winces when she hears the heart monitor stop making any sort of noise at all.

There’s no flatlining, no white noise anymore because the electrodes don’t have anything to take readings from, but the whole room feels better because of that.

Roan seems to read her next thought, because he chucks over from the seat of the chair a pair of black thermal leggings and a sports bra that looks like it is going to be the perfect fit. That worries her for a moment, knowing that Roan has taken note of her bra size just from observation.

But this is one of those ones that zips up at the front and she’d rather get out of this stupid hospital rag with stupid little cherry and blue stripes along the body of it than grill him on how he knew what size she wears.

And he even has the decency to turn his back without a word, waiting for her to scoot the clothes on and tear the gown open once she’s got them both under it.

It’s not that cold when she takes the robe off, even with her shoulders and her arms and her stomach exposed. The bra doesn’t cover nearly as much skin as it should do, because her breasts have always been a little larger than normal. Clarke tries not to feel self-conscious about the extra flesh on show and she can tell Roan is _trying_ not to check her out when he turns back around.

But his eyes skirt over her and linger near her neck.

“Have you got like, a sweater or something?” she asks, folding her arms back across herself to block her cleavage from his sights.

“Here,” he mutters, not looking shy in the slightest.

Roan stretches out above him, and tugs at the thin sweater he’s wearing, revealing a white vest top that looks like it belongs on some gym buff, not a commander, or whatever he wants to call himself.

He tosses it over and it lands in the center of her lap, but Clarke can’t bring herself to put it on. For some reason, wearing someone else’s clothes feels too intimate to just be practical.

And then she realizes that she feeds off practicality and has always breathed logic, so she shoves it over herself and holds her breath because at least now she knows they’ve got deodorant around this place: the jumper has been absolutely drenched in it.

“Ready now?” Roan asks, eyes twinkling.

Clarke wriggles to the edge of the bed, hopping awkwardly over Wells’ sleeping form and swinging her legs over the side of it. She takes a moment to prepare herself: the last time she let her weight rest all on her feet, she went tumbling to the ground almost instantly and it definitely wasn’t painless.

But she feels so much stronger than she did when that happened, a lot more ready, and she’s pretty confident that she’ll be able to make it the few feet between her and the wheelchair on her own.

And she does. Not without tripping and stumbling, but she does make it on her own, even if she has to slump into the chair heavily, gracelessly. The wheels go rolling back under her weight and it takes Roan’s foot in the way to stop her from crashing into a wall.

He’s managed to hang the IV from the overhanging pole, so at least she hasn’t torn her arm apart any more.

“What exactly are you planning to do?” Clarke puts her bare feet to rest against the floor, halting the chair as he moves to grip the handles behind it because she still doesn’t quite trust him yet.

“I told you. It’s time for you to see the place, Angel,”

Something in her chest leaps at the idea that she might be able to find her bearings a little more. So far, this whole base has been a tiny room with white walls, a cabinet smothered in flowers and a few beeping machines that she’s realized she doesn’t need anymore.

“Then what are you waiting for?” she smirks up at him and lifts her feet so that she can cross her legs on it, letting him take complete control of the steering.

Roan doesn’t need to be told twice, and they’re turning the corner of the room at a startingly dangerous pace, him not even needing to run to get to the speed he’s charging down the brand new corridor at.

And it’s so much to take in but Clarke tries as hard as she can to remember everything she sees.

It really isn’t anything that would be unexpected.

They are just tumbling through a hallway, much longer than what you’d see in a hospital, but the lights are fluorescent and still clinical, blindingly white, and there are wooden doors strung all along it which don’t fit into the lab atmosphere.

“What is this place?”

She asks it breathlessly, smiling despite herself because there is air running through the tips of her hair that hasn’t been there since she was out on the road.

“It took months to organize the base,” Roan tells her and Clarke senses that this is the beginning of ramble, more or less, because he’s slowed down to walk casually. “We’ve got something sorta like a system, but you’ll never hear anyone actually call it that because there’s always work to be done.”

“Keeping people busy?”

“We can’t all sleep our days away in a hospital bed,”

“We also can’t all hit the ground running after dying like three times over either,” Clarke smirks, pulling at her arm with the other one to stretch it out.

She’s glad that she took his jumper after all, because it’s a lot colder out here than it was in her room, and she’d probably be shivering if she’d left herself in the bra.

“I think you’ll find you died two times, Angel, let’s not exaggerate things,”

“Ah yes,” she muses, biting down on a laugh. “I’m sorry, you were right. How lazy I’ve been,”

Roan is grinning too. She likes his smile; it’s bold and it’s brave and it’s nothing like she’s used to.

“Well, it’s a good thing you’ve got enough time to make up for it then, isn’t it?”

He would have been an excellent salesman in the life before all of this. She’ll tell him that when she isn’t so busy trying to learn the place she’ll be living in for the rest of the near future. He doesn’t give in about this whole recruitment thing, and Clarke has a feeling that he won’t ever.

“So where are we then?” she asks, trying not too subtly to change the subject.

“We’ve got all of the med shit on this floor. I’m taking you to the ward now, and all of these rooms are used for storage mainly. There are a few research labs down here,” he tells her, pointing left over her head when they reach a junction in the corridor. He turns them right though and so Clarke questions him.

“Research?”

She’s heard that word many times through her medical career, and she’d always thought it was much too vague to just be passed over, like he’s trying to do now.

“Yeah, I don’t really get too caught up in all of that,” Roan shrugs mildly. “It’s not my area,”

“If you’re king, isn’t all of this your area?”

“No, _because_ I’m king, I get to choose where my areas are. And I don’t want to know what they’re doing in those labs,”

Clarke watches his throat bob. He’s not scared: this man looks like he’s never going to be scared of anything, but he still looks uncomfortable. Disturbed to an extent that maybe what they’re doing deserves to be confidential.

“They wouldn’t bring the infection into here though, would they?”

The doors to the few rooms down that way look no different to the other ones. It seems strange, like they shouldn’t be wood. They should be more than wood and rusted latches.

“They wouldn’t be that stupid?”

“I don’t know,” he answers. “The Ark are the only ones that are allowed to leave and we for sure haven’t been bringing it back in for them,”

“Good,” Clarke decides, because that _is_ good. ‘Research’, whatever that may be, is nowhere near as much of a priority as survival is. Risking the sterility of the base would be foolish. One drop of that damn infection and the whole ocean they’ve created will be contaminated.

Roan doesn’t give her long to eye up those labs before he’s turning them, picking up the pace again, and drives them towards what looks like another set of crossroads.

“More storage?”

“Sure,” he nods, sounding like he doesn’t really care what the rooms they’re passing contain. They mustn’t be too important then, because he doesn’t seem like the type to lie to her about that. He’s proved that enough, at least.

It takes a couple more rounded corners before they’re approaching something different. Gone are the small, closet-fitting doors that appear every few feet. Now Clarke can only see one set of heavy double fire doors, that look like they swing out both ways on their hinges.

“This the ward?” She asks.

“Yup. You want to go in?”

“Is it busy?”

Clarke doesn’t want to go in if it is. The comments that the few people she’s actually spoken to have made, have given her cause to believe that meeting strangers is going to be quite the endeavor from now on. She’d rather do it while she isn’t reliant upon a wheelchair for mobility, while she isn’t strung up to it like a cow being drained for its blood.

She’d rather show her face when she isn’t being held by another man’s sweater.

“It’s like two in the morning. I doubt it,”

God, she’s really going to have to start sleeping to a schedule. When she gets out of that private room; she’s going to be absolutely fucked otherwise.

“Okay,”

He pushes her closer to the doors and seems to be ready to use her feet as the contact to the surface of the wood, like he’s okay with letting her lead the way inside but he stops just short of it and seems to remember something.

“Wait there,” Roan says as he takes his hands away from the handles of the chair and walks around it to get in front of her.

He opens one of the doors without dropping another word and he peers, craning around it as though he’s trying to cut Clarke away from looking in as much as possible. Like he’s hiding her from something.

But apparently the coast is clear, because he chucks his head back and smirks.

“All good,” he nods again and then she’s being pushed into a room bigger than she’s seen in a very long time.

It’s around the same size as the mess hall was back in Nebraska, so Clarke can’t even begin to imagine the spread of that same room here. There are probably about three dozen single beds lining each side of the room and it reminds her of something familiar, sparks something inside of her, until she remembers what she’s associating the ward with. It’s like Hogwarts, she grins.

And then regrets the smile because this isn’t a kids’ movie.

There are a couple people in traditional white lab coats dithering about at the far end of the room, too far for Clarke to register any sort of recognition. She wouldn’t know them even if she could see them properly.

The beds all look very similar to hers, but she has three pillows, all about twice the size of the ones scattered along these mattresses. And she’d guess that these ones aren’t made of marshmallow. Marshmallow seems like it must be pretty scarce around here.

“So I was in here first?”

“Yeah, that bed over there,” he points vaguely over to somewhere in the middle of the column on the right hand side, but Clarke can’t figure out the exact place he’s pointing at.

Down by where the standing physicians are, Clarke can see a couple of body shaped lumps on the first few beds and they must be casualties of some sort.

There are no curtains to pull around each individual space. There is at least a bedside table between each one, and even that seems like it’s a luxury to have in a place like this.

She doesn’t know any of the patients in those beds either, and she doesn’t know why she keeps expecting to.

She knows no one here.

“I’m glad they moved me,” Clarke hums.

“You want to see something else?”

She’s glad she doesn’t have to ask to leave; feels like it would come across as insensitive considering this was where she was taken care of during the first few weeks of her recovery, but the smell of antiseptic is overwhelming.

“Please,”

Roan scoffs at her attempt to be polite but turns them around anyway and rolls her out of the room without any sort of acknowledgement to the people at the other end of the mile-long room.

“Another floor?”

“Why are you doing this?”

He doesn’t expect her to snap at him once they’ve left the room, maybe he expected her to hold out at least a little longer to quit it with the small talk, but Clarke already feels like she’s had to take way too much in, in such a small amount of time.

“What are you trying to do?”

It’s the way he keeps his face blank. The way he doesn’t let anyone get a read on him. It is infuriating.

Roan breathes a sigh from behind her but doesn’t stop pushing the chair along the stark white tunnel, seemingly following dimmed out fire escape signs now.

“Just making sure you don’t feel trapped,” he tells Clarke. “It’ll help you when you get out, to know where everything is,”

That doesn’t feel like the whole truth, but it’s a little more than half the truth and Clarke supposes she should just accept that for now.

“This place is like a maze. I probably won’t know where I’m going,”

“You’ll still have us to take you where you _need_ to go. Those three sat by your side relentlessly for four months, I don’t think that’s going to quit any time soon. No, this is just for if you need… some space,”

“I should come to the med ward?”

“God no,” he winces. “That was just because we were right next to it.”

Clarke expects the stairs that they get to, to be awkward, but they aren’t at all. Roan just lifts up the chair like it is as light as a feather, and then he’s carrying the two of them up just as quickly as before.

It’d be impressive, Clarke thinks. It really would be. If she hadn’t been carried across countries in another man’s arms.

He’s not preening or anything though, so it is pretty easy to ignore.

“What floor are we on?” she asks when she gets a brief look over the side of the banister and notices countless flights barreling onwards, downwards.

She doesn’t like staircases, she’s decided. Bad memories and all. As long as he doesn’t drop her, as long as she doesn’t split her head open again on the side of one of these steps, then she’s sure she can manage being here. It still feels a little too uncomfortable.

“Relatively speaking, we’re on the fourth floor,”

“Relatively speaking?”

“We go underground,” Roan whispers even though the flights they’re on are empty.

Yeah, she’s going to have a really hard time not feeling trapped in this place.

“How far down? Are we underground right now?”

That would explain the lack of windows.

“Yeah, only just though,” he adds, sensing her discomfort with being technically buried.

“What’s above us?”

They carry on a lot like that, for longer than Clarke remembers him saying he has to spare.

Roan explains things like what floor holds what, where people go when they aren’t working, things that Clarke knows she should probably remember, but probably won’t.

She learns that the underground levels are mostly used for storage; things like weapons, clothes, medicine. Roan mentions that they don’t house anyone down below ground level, which is a relief because Clarke doesn’t want to sleep in the ground for any longer than she has to.

Apparently the ground level is where they keep the mess hall, and he tells her that she is right in thinking that place is huge. It needs to be, after all.

“How do you feed everyone?”

“Down in the labs, we’ve got a couple mad scientists. They’ve been working on this algae. Don’t expect me to know all of the science involved but if we didn’t have them then we’d be struggling for sure. Everyone gets rations of normal food: carbs, protein as much as we can spare it, but a spoonful of that plant shit somehow has enough to keep people going through the day,”

“Mad scientists?” Clarke smiles.

“You met one of them last night,”

She tries to remember what happened last night, but the memory comes back to her in a haze. There might have been someone, though. Someone framed all lanky and awkward, that goofy smile and oversized lab goggles on his head like he’d forgotten they were there.

“Him?” she asks, scrunching her nose up.

It takes a moment, but then Roan is rumbling low in his throat and Clarke manages to work out that he’s laughing by the time he’s finished with it.

“Yeah,” he nods his head, clamping his mouth shut like he’s trying to quit from laughing again.

Was that rude of her?

“But he’s a kid?”

“A fucking smart one though. Might be an idiot, but he’s a genius,”

“That doesn’t make sense,”

“It will do when you meet him,”

When she asks about the floors higher up, Roan tells her that they’ve got a ranked system to help with restricted access maintenance. Apparently the higher up you get, the more access you’ve got which all adds up to Clarke.

The floor containing the mess hall has a couple other facilities like a large room that has been deemed the exercise hall. But when she asks what it’s got in it, Roan only shrugs and tells her he’s only ever see them try to line the floor with duct tape, as a way of creating some sort of track.

It sounds pretty pathetic, but then again that’s the kind of luxury that you just can’t afford to have when you’re stuck in a place like this.

Plus, people get pretty inventive if they want to. They use bags of flour as weights, he tells her, or find broken mattresses to use as yoga mats.

The next few floors are all housing, Clarke comes to know. And the higher a person’s bunk is, the higher their rank may be.

“Which floor are you on?” she asks when he doesn’t move to go down any of these floors either.

“None of these,” he says and waves vaguely to the doors they’re passing.

And then above housing, Clarke learns that the restrictions start to factor into it, because Roan takes her to a door that has a keypad on it.

“Should I be here?”

She can’t see his face because he’s started to type in a string of numbers, but he makes a scoffing sound and shrugs his shoulders.

“What even is this?”

“It’s the Ark floor,” he answers simply, and the door makes a sound, sort of like a key unlocking the latch.

“You have a whole floor?”

They really weren’t kidding when they started talking about celebrity.

“It was per my instruction. I knew if they wanted to have an army like us, then it wouldn’t work if we were just together on missions,”

“An army?”

Clarke likes the way he talks. Everything he says is said with clarity, it’s said with certainty and she finds that she wouldn’t mind listening to it for a while longer.

It’s like storytelling.

He’s pushing her through the door and down a considerably narrower corridor. This must be what all of the housing areas are like though. They mustn’t need wide hallways for places like this.

“The Ark is made of fighters. We’re soldiers,”

When he talks about the Ark, every word is laced with pride. Clarke likes that too. That word, that word is what lets her know that, no matter how much she might be scared of getting back out into the battlefield, becoming a part of the Ark is the only option for her.

She is a soldier.

“And to function I knew we’d have to eat together, train together, work together…” he trails off and then casts a leaning smirk over her shoulder so that he can get down to whisper in Clarke’s ear. “Sleep together,”

She can’t help but bark a laugh. Hoping that that was his only intention, that he only meant to make her smile, she allows herself to do just that. Roan looks like he’s got thick skin; he won’t be offended by her laughing at even the thought of sleeping with him. It’s just absolutely ridiculous, to so explicitly call for something like that now.

“It’s good for the team,” he shrugs innocently, like he hasn’t just said what he said.

“Oh I’m sure you getting laid is just what the team needs,” Clarke smiles, still giggling under her breath.

“Well we all need something to fight for,”

“And your something is sex?”

“Like I said, it’s good for the team,”

What he’s saying might be vulgar, but when he flashes those grizzly white teeth, Clarke feels oddly charmed.

He wheels her through the corridor and she knows that they’re going past the rooms of the members of the Ark. There’s no give away as to who is in what room though, there are just numbers, above individual keypads, branded to each door, scaling all the way up to thirteen.

Roan stops at the twelfth door and a flash of panic overwhelms Clarke when he leans in to it, and raps those same three knocks he used for her own door a couple days ago.

“What are you doing?” she snarls as he shoots her a grin that reads calculating, that screams mischief.

Helplessly, Clarke shrivels up into his jumper, bringing the sleeves of it all the way over her fists and buries her nose into the top of it. She’s still half-machine. She doesn’t want to meet anybody new like this.

And then all of that momentary fear seeps away as quickly as it flooded through her, and she feels guilty about not trusting Roan, not knowing that he wouldn’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do yet, because it isn’t a stranger that swings the door open with a disgruntled look on her face.

“It’s two o’clock Roan, I haven’t stopped all day, so you better have a fucking good excuse- what the hell is she doing here?!”

It’s going to take some time for Clarke to adjust to the fact that they won’t have to keep their voices lowered anymore. They aren’t at risk around these parts of being caught. They can shout as loudly as they want to, theoretically.

The anger that dawns over Raven’s face would be hysterical normally.

“Chill Reyes,” he practically beams, and his eyes seem to sink into his face. “I’m just showing her around. Thought she might want to see her new room,”

Raven’s almost panicked gaze flickers across the wheelchair, the IV that Clarke is strung up to, and then on to Clarke’s blank expression, because she doesn’t really know what she should be doing in a situation like this. It feels an awful lot like when Mom and Dad are fighting over what to do with their kid.

Clarke decides to offer Raven a small smile, sheepish in a way because she knows she shouldn’t really be here. She shouldn’t be anywhere but in her hospital bed, and she especially shouldn’t be on the Ark floor.

“How noble,” Raven tuts her teeth and rolls her eyes, but something in her defiance gives in because her hand slumps from where it had been holding the door open between her and them, and she gestures it casually to wave the two of them in.

Roan winks at Clarke on his way back around the wheelchair. So he’s definitely got a thing for Raven. There’s a waiting list, she thinks. You’ll have to get in line.

“Cage finally let me get you in here,” Raven says to Clarke when she’s shut the door behind them.

The room isn’t what she expected in all honesty. It’s larger than she imagined it would be, and it doesn’t have a window like she’d hoped it might. She hasn’t seen one of those yet, and she’s starting to doubt if there are any at all in this whole damn building. There is a bunk bed, and the bottom one has been stripped, with a couple of pillows placed haphazardly on top of it. It’s by the place where a window should be, on the far-left corner in the room and opposite it, there is a cabinet with the drawers thrown open, unfolded clothes hanging from them.

“They’re letting me stay on the Ark floor?” she wonders and doesn’t have to ask Roan to move her towards the center of the room some more.

There’s a lot of floor space, enough that if she wanted to, she’d be able to turn in the chair.

“You agreeing to joining helped a lot. Think of it as convenience,” Roan grins and Clarke looks up at him warily.

“I haven’t agreed yet,”

But she will. And he knows that.

“No, Cage just wants to feel like he’s got power over everyone and everything,” Raven snorts, pushing herself to jump up on to the bed. “Anyone else would understand without putting up a month-long fight,”

“The wannabe commander?”

“See?” Roan smirks, patting her on the shoulder as he goes to join Raven on her bunk, the pair of them swinging their legs off it like they are ten years old. “Told you you’d catch on fast,”

“So there are twenty six of you?” Clarke asks, adding the rooms up in her head.

“No, fifteen as of now. But not all the rooms are being used,”

“You all share?”

“No. It just happens how it happens,”

They spend a while talking her through all of this, like the sleeping arrangements and such. It’s pretty easy conversation, doesn’t feel too rushed even when Raven starts to yawn every three minutes. She just seems happy to be talking to Clarke again.

There’s a lot that they haven’t spoken about though, and Clarke knows that they’ll have to reconnect when they aren’t being held in the company of anyone else.

And then Roan tells her that they’re gonna have to keep moving if she wants to see the place some more, and they say goodbye to her room. Clarke gives Raven a quick hug, turning the brunette down when she offers to help on the tour because she’s already half asleep.

Wells has his own little med store, just for when they come back from missions and aren’t cut up enough to go all the way to the infirmary, but still need medical attention. This place feels a lot like a hotel, the way you have to navigate through ten different corridors before you get to where you need to go.

There’s even a rec room but Roan says they’ve only got a few sparring mats on the floor of it, and no one goes in there anyway apparently. Maybe they’re all too tired, or too busy.

Clarke learns about the gym on this level, which is apparently the complete opposite of the makeshift exercise room downstairs. She wants to see it, but Roan tells her that people are training in there now and doesn’t stop there because he knows that she doesn’t want to meet anyone right now.

The sounds coming from it are quite intense though. There’s got to be a punching bag in there because whoever that is inside, they’re going at it. Whoever pissed them off is going to be certain to regret that, that’s for sure.

“Who’s inside?” Clarke whispers so that they don’t hear her. There are windows into the room, the height of the wall and seemingly spanning the length of it, but there are shutters pulled down across them so the only thing she has to go on is the low grunting and the nonstop pounding against something heavy.

“Shall I check?”

But it wouldn’t be Murphy because she’s always gotten the vibe that exercise isn’t his thing and Wells and Raven are already in places that are not here.

It’s a man. It’s not Octavia.

“Where would he be?”

Roan seems like he knows enough to understand her. There is no one else, after all.

She doesn’t know what he’s doing. They are still in the middle of this corridor, but he lets go of the handles either side of her and strides around the chair, crouching down so that he can meet Clarke in the eye.

He even goes so far as to put a palm on her knee, almost like he’s bracing himself to not fall over, but Clarke also gets the feeling that he’s trying to reassure her just as much.

“He’s part of the Ark, Angel,” he says slowly, quietly, a sad look on his face as though he understands something she doesn’t. Like he’s getting ready to mend a broken heart. “He lives on this floor.”

“But he doesn’t want to see me,” Clarke is only reminding herself. Maybe it’d be so easy to just find him, wherever he is. But if he doesn’t want her then maybe there isn’t a point in that.

Roan hums back, squeezes her knee a little harder, fingers edging at the outskirts of his sweater.

Has he got the anger of the man inside that room? Has Bellamy got that now? Is that what he is now?

“You want to see inside?” Roan asks softly. Softer than she could have expected from someone like him.

But she can’t see Bellamy. Not if he doesn’t want her. She doesn’t have the strength to face him like this, not here and not now, not with the reputation she’s managed to garner.

Clarke thinks she shakes her head weakly and that’s all it takes for Roan to get the message because he nods once, confident and knowing, and he’s scooting back around to get her the hell out of here.

But it’s too late. Because the door to that rumbling gym swings open as though it weighs nothing, as though it was punched by a gust of wind. And it smashes into the wall on the other side of it with all of the force of the push, making a bang that draws from Clarke a wince and a jump.

And she isn’t anywhere near the door, Roan having lined her up with one of the shaded windows a little further along, but that’s a good thing. It’s good that she’s too far away to be noticeable.

Because then something barrels out of the room, quick enough that she’s pretty sure he might collide into the wall opposite, until he doesn’t.

The glimpse of his face, that tiny, fleeting snapshot that Clarke manages to capture gives her barely anything because she can only see blue and purple and red from where she is.

That’s expected though. He did, after all, get beaten to a pulp only yesterday.

But it’s enough for Clarke to know. She’ll always know.

She doesn’t have to wonder if she’s dreaming now. The lights are piercing and if she were dreaming, then Bellamy would turn around and look at her. It isn’t like last night when she was forced to sit and wait for something to happen because this is going on around her and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

She’s not fast enough. Not here yet.

And so Bellamy throws himself out of the room, and Clarke’s heart leaps from the chair. Because it never belonged here in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Sheltered as you took my heart,'  
> \- Take my heart, Birdy
> 
> Quit making me cry in the comments!- on the other hand, don't.


	23. We finally find this, then you're gone

It’s the way he wrenches himself across space. He looks so caught up in his head, looks like he can’t take in anything else going on around him.

A glance down to his scrunched up fists lets Clarke know that he was the one taking something out on a punching bag; they are almost as bloodied and cut up as his face is. And the grunting from inside has stopped, so that must have been him while he was going for it.

He is wearing clothes that Clarke has never seen before. So simple but so goddamn effective: just a grey t-shirt with sweat patches taking up more of the fabric than not, so it’s faded to a little darker now. And he’s wearing camo slacks, ones that look like standard issue uniform. They’re a bit baggy on his form and the shirt is tighter than it should be. There is muscle rippling through it, creating a shell around his torso made from cotton and framed perfectly.

He still looks amazing, from what she can see. That hasn’t changed, at least. It still only takes the shape of his figure to steal her breath away.

Clarke is forced to take it all in in no time whatsoever, because before she knows it, Bellamy is throwing himself to the other side of the narrow hallway and he’s driving toward the bare wall, never ending thanks to the many twists and turns along it. His fists come up in front of him and then he’s smashing them into the plaster, raised above his head.

Only once. He only punches the wall once. But that’s enough to take all of the rigidity from his body because he doesn’t pull his weight back from the target.

Bellamy slumps against it, collapses under the point where his fists will leave clear dents. And the sound he makes, God, the sound he makes. It’s the sound that lives in Clarke’s nightmares. It’s a shout, it’s a cry for help.

It’s frustrated and it’s violent and it’s convulsive. It lasts too long to be anything but pain.

And he hasn’t seen either of them clearly. Roan might have his hands steady on both of the handles on Clarke’s chair, but he’s made no move at all to take her away. This is all too fragile. It’s like catching something rare on a nature documentary; like they’re watching the lion give way to the lambs.

Bellamy’s shoulders are shaking, writhing in the frame he’s holding himself with, but his face is buried in the crook in his elbow, his forearm pressed flat against the wall to act as a pillow.

That was her pillow once. And she didn’t need it to be made of marshmallow for it to be perfect.

If he’s sobbing, he’s doing it in a way that gives him as much privacy as you’re ever going to get in a public place.

The only things that give him away are the irregular choked sounds that are only just muffled by the bulk of his arm, and the way he is tremoring, seemingly just as angry with the fact that he’s crying as he is with the reason he’s crying in the first place.

“Bellamy,”

Clarke doesn’t know why she says it. Honest to God, she has no clue what she thinks saying his name will do to help this situation, or the one she was worried about moments ago, or the one before that or the one before that one before that.

But his name still tastes amazing on her lips. It still tastes like electricity. It still tastes like she’s dipping her toe into charged water, and the aftermath of saying it still tingles its way through her body just like a shock would.

She says it so quietly, so hushed that he might not even hear it over the sounds of his own panic.

And then that thought gets wiped away just as quickly as it washes over her, because his whole body freezes. It’s unnatural, she can’t help but think. It’s not normal for such an expressive movement to be switched off so suddenly, but Bellamy seems to lose control of his whole body.

The tension returns in tenfold; his shoulders expand like they’re bracing themselves, and he becomes a statue. He becomes a toy soldier, the ones you’d find under your bed because they were so easy to lose once you stopped playing with them.

And all Clarke can do is sit there and gape at him.

Roan pushes down on the wheelchair from where he’s grasping at it, like he’s getting ready to take off with it. Clarke wouldn’t blame him if he did.

Bellamy gives her no sign that he recognizes her. He gives her nothing. Just stays there pressed tightly to the wall, hiding as much of himself as he can like they’re kids playing hide and seek.

_I can’t see you so you can’t see me._

From the way that his shoulders move, Clarke can tell that he’s taking a few deep breaths. And then he’s pushing away from the wall, but it’s controlled this time. It’s with a tame understanding of his own strength, a convincing one anyway. He doesn’t even look in her general direction. He doesn’t even let Clarke get a glimpse of him before he’s spinning, whirling on his heels like he’s forgotten how to walk.

And then he’s striding down the corridor in the opposite direction from her, turning the corner at a pace similar to a jog. And he’s gone. Just like that. Like he was never here at all. Like he’d never given the two of them such a raw display of emotion.

He ignores everything that Clarke is. No, he does more than ignore her. It’s like he’s erased every part of her from his memories; it’s like he’s _forgotten_ what she is.

It’s cold enough of a rejection that for one insane moment, she begins to wonder if what they had, if all they had together was just another figment of her imagination. Isn’t it more probable that she’s just created someone very similar to the man she just saw in her head, like an imaginary friend to keep her company?

Maybe she was wrong about which of her boys were her Jiminy Cricket.

And then Roan is squeezing at her shoulder so tightly that it may as well have been him who just lost his heart. The touch lets Clarke know that she is allowed to be hurt by whatever just happened, that he was expecting to have to comfort her at some point. So she couldn’t have made the person that Bellamy was to her up in her head, because if Roan expected her heart to break then he knows that they were real.

“Clarke do-”

But she doesn’t want him to speak. She doesn’t know if she can take it right now. There she goes, being weak again.

“Just,” she starts, but has to clear her throat when something unbearably scratchy gets caught in it. “Just take me back to Wells?”

And because, from what Clarke has seen, he knows how to care, and how to care appropriately, Roan doesn’t say anything else. He wheels her all the way back to the underground without another word and he doesn’t interrupt the spiraling in her mind.

So Bellamy’s definitely not dead. And she’s definitely not dead. And he lost his mother. So why doesn’t he need her?

Maybe that’s just it: maybe he does need Clarke. Of course he does. And she wasn’t there for him.

Is that why he can’t even look at her? Is that why he can’t even be bothered to come and see how she’s doing? Is that why he wouldn’t even fight back when Wells jumped him?

They get back down to Clarke’s hospital room without any more incidents, not that that matters because if that’s what Bellamy is going to act like around her then she doesn’t want to see how other people treat her.

Roan seems as calm as ever, but she can hear the cogs in his mind ticking away behind his cloaked expression.

Clarke only just manages to find the words when she sees the slightly odd face of the door she’s only really seen from the other side. She’s stopped from saying anything when the door swings violently open, not anywhere near as hard as how Bellamy had torn from the gym, but enough to make her jump in the chair.

It opens inwardly and Roan doesn’t really seem to notice, more just takes it as an opportunity to push Clarke through the opening. And he doesn’t seem to see Wells either, or how he’s snarling and acting as a barricade to the room.

“Are you crazy?”

His voice sounds calm, as Wells always does. But he looks properly angry and his eyes are darting between the two of them frantically.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

His gaze lands on Roan and he pushes closer so that Clarke is stuck in the wheelchair between the two of them.

“She’s been running around the whole building looking for her,” he sighs, frustrated.

Clarke reaches out for his hand, which is at her eye-level so it’s the easiest thing to grab.

“Relax Wells,” she tries, clearing her throat while she’s speaking because she doesn’t have time to choke down the lump that had formed back there. “We saw Raven upstairs. She’s fine,”

Clarke hears something creak from behind her, and she doesn’t have to turn her head to know that it is Roan tightening his grip on the handlebars.

“He’s not talking about Raven,” he says lowly, to Clarke.

“You can’t just do that,” Wells barrels forward, sounding more tired than mad. “You should have told someone before you decided to wheel her out of here,”

“I did tell someone. I told Clarke,”

A sigh tears itself from Wells’ mouth and he seemingly gives up on Roan because he turns his focus to Clarke, who struggles to keep a hold of his grasp as he bends down to get on her level, crouched awkwardly.

“Where did he take you?”

The way he says it… it helps Clarke realize that there’s going to be a wrong answer to his question.

“Just… around,” she shrugs casually, knowing that if anyone mentions Bellamy then she isn’t going to be able to keep the nonchalance.

She’s becoming more and more tired now that she can see her bed. So close but so far.

Everything goes a little fuzzy as she waits for Wells to say something else and it dawns on him almost comically slow. It’d be funny if there were any signs of amusement in his expression.

“He took you to Ark,” he blanks, the blame for Roan transparent. He looks up at the man after resting both hands on to Clarke’s forearms, partly to steady himself but also partly to hold her. Like he knows that she needs to be held. “You fucking idiot. Why would you do that?”

She hears Roan roll his eyes.

“Because it’s going to be her new home. She deserves to see it,”

“And you didn’t think to consider that he’d be there?”

There it is. Always Bellamy. Clarke can’t do this right now. She’ll do it after she’s gotten some rest.

“You didn’t think what it would be like for her to see him again?”

“It was shit,” she tries to smile but it definitely doesn’t work. “I just want to sleep now,”

Wells doesn’t seem to hear the last part of what she says, even if his grip tightens on her protectively. He just seems to become more surprised.

“He was there?”

Roan makes a scoffing sound.

“Fucking mess,”

Clarke winces as he says it, and her head gets heavier. So heavy that it’s becoming more effort than she can afford to hold it up.

“Don’t,” she pleads, unable to hear how much pain Bellamy looked like he was in, in every way.

“You destroyed him man. Remind me not to get on your bad side,”

When Clarke’s head rolls weightily around her neck and comes to land on her shoulder, Wells seems to catch on to how uncomfortable she is now. All she wants is her bed, and some quiet, and some sleep.

“I quite like my face,” Roan carries on, oblivious to Clarke physically melting down and still trying to make light of it.

“Roan,” Wells growls; a warning.

There’s silence for a moment, as the three of them let the tension hang loosely in the air. It’s quiet enough that the sounds of footsteps walking past the room manage to seep into it, and Clarke startles at the thought of having to maybe see anyone else tonight.

Wells catches her eye, and hers must be blown wide- like a bush baby’s- because he takes in her panic and sets his expression to one of concentration, squeezing her knee to let her know that he’ll take care of her before he stands to reach for her IV.

Clarke takes that as her opportunity to go back to bed, knowing that she really just needs the comfort of a mattress underneath her body and the hold of a few pillows.

He offers his arm when she stands, but Clarke would rather use her last few drops of energy on getting herself over there without looking like she’s reliant on someone else, even if she really is.

When she successfully makes it to the bed without getting all tangled up in the IV chord, Clarke crashes her head down against the pillows, hoping it might soothe the dull ache that has started to form at the back of it.

“Should I lock the door?” Roan asks after he has cleared his throat, sounding a lot more serious now that he’s seen the state Clarke is in.

“Why would you?” she mumbles back drearily. “No one is coming to see me,”

Wells settles into the chair closest to where Clarke is and grimaces as he checks her over, hand light on her head to help get it comfortable on the pillows.

“That’s not strictly true,”

“What? Wells I don’t think I can handle seeing anyone else right now. Everyone’s a stranger,”

“I can stand outside?” Roan offers from the bottom of her bed. “Stop anyone from coming in?”

“You would do that?”

“Eh, who cares about sleep?” he shrugs his shoulders casually, winking over one of them when he turns towards the door.

“Sleep is underrated,” Clarke answers him, knowing he’s wrong as she snuggles deeper into the soft cotton.

“Ah, well, you know what they say. No rest for the wicked.”

Clarke lets her eyes close, feeling sleep wash over her.

Roan must hesitate at the doorway though, once he’s opened it up, because his voice still bounces around the room.

“If she comes…”

“Don’t let her in,” Wells tells him, both hands on Clarke’s neck as she really starts to lose control.

Is there something wrong with her? It’s like she’s fainting without… actually fainting.

“It isn’t time,”

“Wells this isn’t right,” Roan says, still hesitating with his hand on the door handle. “You can’t keep something like this hidden. If it were me-”

“But it isn’t you Roan. She’s been through hell and back, and she doesn’t even know it,”

Clarke doesn’t want to hear anyone talking anymore. Spending even an hour outside of this room has overwhelmed her to the point of not having control over her own body.

“Sh,” she whispers shortly. “I don’t feel so good,”

“Tell me where it hurts,”

“My head. It just feels wrong,”

Wells’ fingers drift across the expanse of her scalp and when he grazes the tips against the scar at the back of her head, Clarke winces and can’t hold back the pathetic “ouch” that seeps from her lips.

“Hey,” he mumbles, craning over her and seemingly looking for a place that might give any sort of indication to new injury. “No falling asleep on me, okay? We’ve got to get you checked out first,”

“I’m sleepy,” Clarke argues, and it feels like a perfectly valid point in the moment. “I can’t think straight Wells. He looked so broken. Was that, was it my fault?”

She might sound weak. She might not be able to open her eyes. It doesn’t matter.

“Wells did I break him?”

Wells makes a sound low in the back of his throat and it’s not enough of anything to be a hum, but it still reminds Clarke somewhat of a lullaby and she’d rather just hear something like that, so she does.

The latch on the door clicks again, and a non-existent draft washes over her.

“She alright?” Roan asks, sounding perfectly genuine.

“She’s just drained,” Wells decides when the only scars he can find are months old, and he settles back on to her bed to hold her close to his chest.

“I can’t wait for people to start talking about me like I’m actually here,”

“We’re just worried about you,”

Clarke doesn’t really have much else to say to him. She doesn’t think she has a thing to say to a single soul. They seem to be content with the silence, because no one speaks for longer than Clarke can count the seconds, for longer than she can count the sheep.

The light switch flickers, noticeable even with her eyes closed. It gets turned off when Clarke has buried her face into Wells’ jersey. At least they understand that she can’t stand the brightness anymore.

“So you saw him?” Wells asks in a rush after a while, almost like he’s been trying for ages not to ask the question. He knows that Clarke isn’t asleep; maybe he wants her to be awake for this even if he isn’t asking her.

“I thought we’d be safe,” Roan hums back, evidently trying to stay quiet for Clarke’s benefit. “It’s two in the fucking morning; no one is up at this time,”

“Where?”

“In the gym,” Clarke answers as she tightens her fist into the shirt. “He was punching something over and over and over and over,”

If she says too many ‘overs’ then the boys don’t say anything.

“He really is fucked up,” Roan scoffs, skipping over the way Clarke’s voice breaks. “Knew we were there but he completely blanked her. Treated her like she didn’t fucking exist,”

“He was crying,”

“I’m sick of it,”

Roan and Clarke aren’t technically arguing, it’s more that they’re just having two completely different conversations. Wells considers the two of them for a moment, and then places a palm flat over the top of Clarke’s head so that he can lay his on cheek on top of that.

“We never saw the two of them out there,” he is addressing Roan, trying to sound diplomatic.

“I’m starting to think it’s all bullshit,” Roan isn’t trying to sound diplomatic. “You know, some things just don’t add up,”

“Clarke isn’t making it up,” Wells says definitively. She can feel his eyes boring into her face, or just the parts of it that aren’t hidden in his clothes.

“It could just be… hysteria,”

“No. I know Clarke. Emotions have always been something she struggled with, so she just never really tried with them. It sounds cliché but she found a way to lock her heart up. Nobody got in there the way he has,”

All past tense. _So that isn’t me anymore_ , she thinks, but can’t decide whether or not he thinks it’s a good thing. It doesn’t sound very good as Wells says it. Although that could just be wariness.

“You think she’ll forgive him?”

“I don’t think he’ll even ask for forgiveness,” he mutters, sounding completely honest. “You do realize you haven’t thought it through, right?”

“Be quiet,” Clarke whispers and kicks him in the shins to get her point across. He holds her shoulders tighter to himself, squeezes gently, but carries on the conversation with a little bit more of a hushed voice.

“If you let her join the Ark, they’ll be working together,”

“If I don’t let her join, then that will be letting him win,”

“It’s not worth it. She shouldn’t have to be forced into that kind of situation, not when we’re out there fighting,”

“It sounds an awful lot like she’s in her element when she’s fighting, to me,” Roan says, still murmuring his best kind of whisper as Clarke continues to make disapproving grunts.

“It’s not worth it,” Wells repeats himself, sounding set in his opinion.

“They’ll be living together anyway. If she shoots like they say she shoots then they’re both just going to have to put it behind them. For the greater good,”

The greater good. What utter bullshit. Bullshit that Clarke can’t help but agree with. If she is going to be given such responsibility then she can’t waste it on her own hurting. If they’re going to be sent out on life-threatening missions again then she’s going to have to learn how to become a soldier once more.

That is what she used to do best. She could be a soldier. For the greater good.

“It might become a hazard,” Wells warns like he knows exactly what’s going to happen.

“Oh it’ll definitely be a hazard,” Roan agrees casually, sounding like he’s shrugging his shoulders. The crunching of a man biting into something a lot like an apple ripples through the room. “Neither of them are particularly stable,”

He could say that again.

“I’m stable,” she tries to argue back. Even if she is only lying through her teeth, it’s a way to let the two of them know that she’s still listening.

Things fade to black after that and she only manages to catch Wells’ fond “Sure Clarke,” before she crashes again.

 

…

 

It’s going to be strange when Clarke leaves this place. When she doesn’t get to wake up with her hand in someone else’s. It’s started to become something that she checks for when the light starts to hit, and so far she hasn’t been disappointed.

It’s a woman’s hand in hers today. It’s gripping Clarke’s tighter than anyone else’s has and letting one eye fall open slowly reveals Raven sat on the same mattress that Clarke has sprawled out on.

“Well, well, well,” the girl, Raven, says, slouching back on to Clarke’s thighs when she raises her legs to bend her knees. “For a second there I thought you might be entering into round two or somethin’,”

“What?” Clarke tries to ask but her voice comes out scratchy and hoarse.

Raven’s grin spreads wider once she’s given Clarke a plastic cup filled with water.

“You’ve been out for days,”

Days? How was that even possible?

“How many?”

“Three,”

Sure, Clarke had been tired when she’d gotten back from the tour, but surely she hadn’t been that tired? How can someone even sleep for three days straight?

“Dunno why you’re looking so disappointed,” Raven winks and then shuffles Clarke over on to one side of the bed so that she can lay down beside her. “Anyone else would kill to have the rest you’ve had,”

Funnily enough, Clarke doesn’t actually feel like she’s gotten any better. It feels like she’s just kind of on… auto pilot. Like she’s waiting for the plane to crash land again.

“I didn’t mean to make you worry,”

“It’s hardly your fault,”

“Still… you shouldn’t have to wait around like this,” Clarke pushes, playing with her fingers in her lap as she slumps her head on to Raven’s shoulder. A pain shoots up through the top of her spine, almost electrical in the way it moves.

She must wince or make a muted sound because Raven’s grin kind of morphs into an apology.

“They said your head isn’t fully healed. Fools didn’t fucking see it a month ago so they could just be making this shit up now,”

“Head injuries come in all different shapes and sizes, Rae,” Clarke grimaces. “It’s hard to know what they are from the outside,”

It could be quite scary, really, if Clarke were to sit down and actually think about what this means for her own head. It’s been four months since she literally cracked it open on the edge of a step so if it hasn’t healed over by now, then there’s got to be some lasting damage somewhere up in there.

“Did it reopen?” she asks, not wanting to touch it just in case it feels all gnarly against her fingers.

“No,”

“Internal?”

“Yeah,”

“There something you not telling me?”

Raven doesn’t seem shifty… she just looks like there’s something she’s trying not to say.

“There’s still a lot you don’t know, Clarke,”

“Well can you do me a favor then?” Clarke asks, checking over her IV to make sure she’s actually getting the drugs she’s meant to be getting. It doesn’t feel like she is: there’s a dull ache everywhere.

Raven hums patiently, really patiently for someone who has been waiting for months.

“Tell me something I do know. Take my mind off how much all this hurts,”

Never one to have to be asked twice, Raven takes the lead in the conversation Clarke asks for. She tells her about how Wells is still the same old guy they always knew which is a real relief because Clarke had been worried that there might be something different about him.

He still refuses to eat fries with his hands, still showers with the lights off which has always been a little more than strange. He’s still overwhelmingly diplomatic according to Raven and that’s definitely saying something because Raven can keep her head in the hottest of situations.

Clarke doesn’t ask about the fight between him and Bellamy- doesn’t ask why that wasn’t exactly diplomatic, because she’d rather just listen.

Apparently him and Murphy have formed a pretty solid friendship, one that Raven was the last person to guess at. Maybe it’s just one of those things that you have to have when you’re living with someone, but Clarke has a feeling it might be a little more than that.

“They’re good for each other,” Raven shrugs. She doesn’t sound as proud as Clarke feels. “Murphy teaches Wells how to stand up for himself more often, you know, how much he should care around the people that shouldn’t get to see him care,”

“That is good,” Clarke agrees, feeling light-headed with the picture of the two of them getting along in her head.

“And Wells makes him more agreeable. He’s taught him how to take orders from the ones that we can’t really afford to get on the bad side of,”

Raven doesn’t sound like she likes those people very much, if at all. Again, Clarke would ask about them if she actually wanted to know.

“Good old fashioned Bert and Ernie then?”

“Sure. And we both know which one Wells would be,”

It takes a second of wary eye contact. No, less than a second before they’re both giggling the word “Burt,” like it’s actually some kind of punchline. Maybe all of this sleep has just made Clarke delirious.

It feels better than not laughing though, and so the two of them just sit there and laugh for as long as they want to in the fluorescent lights.

“They letting me go any time soon?” Clarke asks with the light easy and the air weighing nothing.

She doesn’t even know who ‘they’ are.

“I think it’s gonna have to be a slow moving process,” Raven answers, trying to sound optimistic. “They said you could start eating in the mess when you wake up,”

“Really?”

That’s certainly a lot more than she expected so she’ll take whatever she can get and roll with it.

“Does that mean today?”

Raven eyes her suspiciously but doesn’t say no.

“You really want to leave here today?” she wonders, gesturing around to the corners of the room like they hold some sanctity. In a way, Clarke supposes they do. And she might not want to meet anyone new but the more time she spends in here, the smaller the unit feels, the closer the walls start to move together.

“Just for a little while,” Clarke thinks she can manage. Then she’ll come back here and continue her endless nap.

“You’re sure about this, right?”

Maybe Raven knows how much seeing Bellamy threw Clarke for a loop. Hell, the pain of it reopened something inside of her own fucking mind. It was so bad that it made her sleep for days.

It could be a good idea to keep to herself for the next week or so, but that’s just not who she is. She can’t become a coward, no matter how much her body is begging her to.

“I’m sure,”

 

…

 

Apparently it’s not as easy as Clarke thought it might be to just take a stroll down to the mess hall and grab some food. In fact, easy isn’t even a word that could be applicable in this situation.

Raven leaves about an hour later, once both of their stomachs have started to rumble undeniably, with a promise that she’ll be right back. It turns out she has to ask the doctors at the med ward for permission to take Clarke out of her room, which makes sense technically because if they were to just walk in and find her bed empty, Clarke doesn’t know for sure if they’d rule out her having evaporated into thin air.

She still hasn’t managed to get a good look at herself, but she knows she looks more dead than alive.

Whenever she runs her fingers over her skin, it feels waxy and grainy at the same time: not how skin is meant to feel. Her cheekbones are a lot more prominent than they should be too. There’s definitely too much accuracy in the way her flesh grips her skull.

Clarke doesn’t want to admit that she’s afraid to look in a mirror- something she hasn’t done in forever- because it’s not good to be afraid of anything. But the thought of seeing the shell her body has become is enough to make her shudder.

She isn’t sure when exactly it was that disconnected her soul from the rest of her. It was probably some point in the descent: when they were out on the road and the infection was spreading, and they all might think that that broken link has been mended but Clarke knows it hasn’t.

When she raises her hand, sure, it might grip on to the table that lies next to her bed as she wants it to, but it doesn’t feel like hers in the way it should. When she grabs at the clothes that have been left on one of the stools: the leggings and crop top that Roan had brought for her in the dead of night, sure, the fabric slips easily over her legs, but it isn’t something she can bring herself to notice.

Skin is just skin. Muscle is just muscle (weakened and probably not there as much as it should be). Bone is just bone. Her mind and soul and heart are in completely different places. Like stabbing a pen all the way through a globe, stabbing Clarke would probably hit everywhere that’s hers, but they aren’t in the same locations…

When Raven comes back, she looks pretty frazzled. Clarke doesn’t ask how it went, or who she had the conversation with. She’s too busy struggling to get the bra over her head. She doesn’t understand how it’s so much harder today than it was with Roan. Maybe because she isn’t scared of baring her skin in front of Raven. Maybe it is subconscious like that.

Raven and her were the type of friends, in the other life, who would shower together when there wasn’t enough time in the preparations for a night out, so it’s not like Clarke’s naked chest is anything new for the girl. She approaches, gestures for Clarke to hold her arms up above her head, and then slips the awkward garment over her head without pity. Good. She doesn’t need pity.

“Thank you,”

“Trust Roan to pick you the strangest fucking bra you’ve ever seen,” Raven rolls her eyes knowingly, a smile on the ends of her mouth.

“That’s not even the creepiest part,” Clarke smiles back. “He guessed my size perfectly.”

If it were anyone else, Clarke has guessed that they wouldn’t be able to get away with things like that. Roan has a charm though. Kind of boyish and explicit in a way that’s filled with charisma. That’s it: it’s charisma.

Raven tuts her tongue against her teeth like a disappointed mother. Practically, it’s good that he could do that. It saves Clarke from embarrassing herself further with her appearance.

Once she’s dressed, the reality of what she’s about to do starts to actually sink in.

Walking out of this room in a wheelchair at two in the morning was completely different from what is coming next. She’s about to enter a room, filled with people she’s never met, who have only known her from discarded rumors, and pretend that she’s doing okay.

Clarke doesn’t want to do it. It’s a mountain that will be painful to climb. Yet she knows that it’s what she needs to do. She’ll never start to recover unless she forces her body into it. If she can convince herself that the state of her might one day be normal, then normal will start to reach out for her.

It’s just a couple of hours, Clarke tells herself. A couple hours of pretending and then she can come back and hide away with the people that she’d never have to pretend around.

She doesn’t want to look half dead around anyone else though. She wants to look strong. She wants them to think that she’s strong.

She’s lost so much weight over the past few months, which is completely understandable. But it’s not like she had been fat before; it was all muscle thanks to the time spent hiking endlessly. Now she’s just nothing. Her stomach used to be at least toned, and now it is starting to peel at her ribs, exposing them like the skin can’t stretch far enough.

“Raven?” she mumbles, voice already quiet because she’s ashamed of what she’s going to ask of her.

“What is it?”

Clarke reaches up to feel the back of her scalp, featherlight fingers tracing the scar oh so carefully. She can’t help but stumble upon some of the knots that have gathered there.

“I don’t want to look like I've got a bird’s nest on my head,”

It really is a stupid thing to worry about. They don’t have time for vanity anymore, and they never will have again. But Raven doesn’t react like Clarke is scared she might, in fact she just seems to sadden more.

“I can help,” she says, voice easy.

The brunette, with that forever effortless ponytail on her head, walks over and sits behind Clarke on the bed, legs crossed like they’re teenagers at a slumber party getting ready to pamper one another. It’s ridiculous.

There’s some shuffling behind Clarke and she turns her head to see what’s going on. Raven is bent awkwardly over the other side of the bed, rooting around in the cupboard of the bedside table and looking for something determinedly.

She comes back up after a few seconds, a black, cheap comb in her hand.

It’s a methodical approach. It always is with Raven. She starts on one side of Clarke’s head at the base of the tips of her hair and gathers a handful to tease away every tangle she can find in that small clump. Once she’s done that, Raven moves upward, until one area is light enough to run her fingers through it with ease.

And then she rotates softly and repeats the process.

It takes more time than they really have to spare but it acts as a great method of procrastination.

Apparently the medics don’t think Clarke is strong enough yet to leave the room without a wheelchair. She’d put up a fight to that if there were any other way of taking her IV with her. She might be ready to start walking again, but there’s no way she could make it without the painkillers.

She’s still not ready for a mirror, so Clarke turns it down when Raven offers for her to see one once she’s happy with the final product.

Clarke settles instead for just feeling what Raven has done. Running her fingers from the top of her head down to the lowest curls, she manages to find a few braids drawn into them which was a pretty good idea because now there’s less of it to run wild.

She has a feeling that she might look a bit like Johnny Depp from the Pirates of the Caribbean but at the end of the day, it could be a look to cross off of the bucket list.

If Raven is happy with it, then Clarke can be too.

And now they’ve run out of excuses to not go into the glaring eyes of the mess hall.

 _It’s what you need, it’s what you need, it’s what you need,_ she tells herself over and over.

There’s a knock at the door and it definitely isn’t Roan. It’s too patient to be Roan’s. Clarke tries not to think about how quickly she’s learnt that after having known him for no time at all.

Raven makes sure that Clarke is sat up comfortably in the wheelchair before she answers it. She doesn’t see how Clarke’s arms fly to cover up her bare midriff, just in case it puts whoever is at the door off of their lunch.

It’s Wells, of course. And he’s seen enough of Clarke before to not become squeamish at the sight of her exposed skin so at least she still has some time to relax.

“Just for the record,” he grumbles as he brushes past Raven, squeezing her arm on the way round. “I think this is a bad idea.”

“You can think anything is a bad idea once you’ve put your mind to it,” Clarke grins, rolling her eyes.

“Yeah, but I think this is a _really_ bad idea,”

“She hasn’t had warm food in months, Wells,” Raven argues practically, which is a completely valid point. By the time they’ve managed to get food down from the kitchens for her, the food had always gone cold.

Clarke hadn’t been complaining, but it would be really cool to have something warm for a change.

“It’ll probably be uneventful,” she adds on.

“You say that now…”

“Lighten up,” Raven sighs, coming to stand behind Clarke’s chair and getting ready to push at it.

“You’re sure then, Clarke?” Wells asks as an afterthought, holding the door open for the two of them.

“Yeah,”

She might not be one hundred percent certain about leaving the hub of safety, but it’s something she’s going to have to do eventually so it may as well be now.

And so they leave with Raven pushing Clarke along the barren corridor, Wells next to the wheels of the chair so that he can act as some sort of buffer in case anything happens.

Raven mentioned earlier that they’d be going to get some lunch, so it must be around midday. Clarke doesn’t think they’ll be right on time though, because she doesn’t think she’ll be able to stomach a huge rush of people.

“You’re sitting with the Ark,” Raven tells her. Her tone makes it sound like that didn’t even need to be said, like there would be no one else that Clarke would ever sit with.

“You sit separately?”

“It’s fairly high school,” Wells shrugs. “Roan keeps pushing this whole idea of family, so we all have to sit at the same table.”

“And on Wednesdays you wear pink?” Clarke guesses.

“Exactly,”

There’s some chattering already rising as they turn a corner, not even off Clarke’s floor yet, and she startles in the chair, freezes up. She doesn’t remember taking the lily that Roan had brought her on the night he met her, but it had been resting contentedly on her bedside table and she thought it might be something good to cling to.

Her bow might be a bit too big and threatening to take into somewhere as public as a mess hall, even if it would have helped her feel more herself. And then there’s always the fear of holding it in her hands again. Maybe she can’t quite face that yet.

No, the lily was a much more harmless choice. She’s got it clutched in her left hand, the petals refusing to wilt no matter how much she grips it.

“It’s okay,” Raven says and cranes her head over Clarke’s body to try to get a better look around.

Wells picks up the pace a little, like he’s guarding the two of them, and reaches the end of this corridor to see who it is.

“False alarm,” he smiles, waving the two girls toward him even if they never stopped moving and Clarke thinks she remembers which way they have to turn to get to the staircase. Left. It’s probably left. The talking is coming from the other direction, drifting closer to the three of them.

Clarke’s gaze lands on two men walking towards them and on first impressions, they both look a lot younger than her. Wait, she’s seen one of them before. He’s still got oversized lab goggles balanced on his head and a lopsided grin.

His name began with a J, she’s pretty sure of it. The light bulb flickers in her mind in the same second that both of them break from whatever excitable conversation they’re having and notice the blockage in the hallway.

 _Jasper_ is the one she knows. They’re both wearing black hoodies with what looks like nametags slung around their necks, like IDs. The other man looks a little more reserved, like he’s folded up into himself in comparison to the flamboyance of Jasper’s movements. He looks Asian, looks smaller, looks nervous when he sees Clarke.

But they’re barreling towards them and Clarke doesn’t have time to even train her face into nervousness before they get to them.

Jasper seems practically gleeful as he approaches Clarke, slapping a hand on to the shoulder of his friend as though it’s a way to lead up to an introduction.

“They let you out,” the goggled man chirps after he’s nodded at Raven and Wells in greeting.

“Turns out I’m still alive,” Clarke smirks back, thinking back to how many times Jasper had said it when he saw her, probably even more times than she did when she found out.

“And with a whole new set of wheels,”

He looks over Clarke’s wheelchair, seemingly checking it out and kicking at the legs of it like he’s planning adjustments to make.

“What can I say? I’m moving up in the world,”

It’s fun to talk to Jasper, she decides. He seems like he doesn’t care too much about anything, like she could say anything, and he’d still not mind so long as he’s filling the time in the company of other people.

“This is Monty,” he throws his thumb over his shoulder as an afterthought, gesturing to the man stood a few paces behind him with both hands in his pockets.

“Hi,” Clarke smiles and raises her open hand to him.

The man, with his hood up over his ears, lifts his eyebrows to the middle of his forehead like he’s surprised when Clarke greets him. Surprised about what though?

“Hey,” he shrugs, avoiding eye contact. He does try to smile and even if it looks a little awkward, it still seems genuine. “How’re you feeling?”

“I’m feeling good,” she tells him, and then thinks better of lying. “I’m feeling better,”

He smirks subtly, like he understood why Clarke had to correct herself. She drops her head amusedly, and that small interaction seems to give him the confidence to step forward to join Jasper.

“You two heading up for food?” Wells asks casually, forever an insidiously natural people person.

They both nod their heads and Clarke thinks one of them makes some sort of quip about needing a late lunch, but it’s blocked out when she remembers something that Roan told her last night. Wait, not last night. A few days ago.

Monty and Jasper must be the mad scientists that keep everyone well fed. Good on them.

No one interrupts her from zoning out, and she only cuts out from the memory when they’re already moving away again, joined by the two mad scientists this time.

They are easy to talk to. And they manage to think of questions to involve Clarke but not push her into answering anything that she might not want to answer. It’s a perfect distraction from the chaos she might be about to walk in on.

“Do you sit with the Ark?” Clarke asks, not wanting to say ‘us’ yet because she isn’t a part of the team right now, and she might not ever be. Secretly, she’s hoping the two of them might be able to bend those rules because they make her feel a lot more at ease. Lots of joking, lots of meaningless chatter.

“No, but it’s not like we can’t be around,” Monty says like he already knows what is hidden behind Clarke’s words.

Raven squeezes her shoulder. Of course she knows what Clarke meant.

“That’d be cool,” Wells nods, already looking weary behind the eyes at having to keep up with Jasper and Monty’s sparring.

“So what’s the food like here?”

They’ve moved into the staircase and Raven and Wells have taken control of carrying Clarke up the stairs, Wells climbing backwards with the footrest in his grip. She takes note of the muscles rippling through his long-sleeved top, wondering how on Earth they got there.

It’s not like he was weak before… but now he has filled out properly. All athletic and firm in ways that don’t quite add up.

She hides a laugh in her bare shoulder, saving it for a time when they are alone together to tease him.

“As good as you could expect the food to be,” Jasper grins, tripping on a step and not bothering to style it out like he does this every day, three times a day.

“Hey, don’t shit on our algae,” Monty shrugs, kicking Jasper behind the knee so that his leg bucks out and he tumbles in slow motion.

Clarke barks a laugh before she slaps her hand over her mouth, then winces when the scar across her palm graces worryingly dry lips. She doesn’t really have much feeling there, not in that skin, probably because it grew so dead once upon a time, but her mouth catches on chaps and flakes that feel… ugly. It’s all just so ugly.

She remembers cutting her face to shreds, she remembers sweating like a frozen furnace in mid-January, but she didn’t feel ugly like she does now. She didn’t feel like she needed to cover up or conceal every single fucking part of her.

“It’s genius,” Jasper throws his hands in the air defensively once he’s stood back steady on both feet. “But we haven’t quite perfected the taste of it yet,”

Wells is wearing a grimace on his face, lips clamped shut like he doesn’t want to admit to anything.

“Guess we’ll just have to see,” Clarke smiles, feeling a lot more relaxed about it than she had moments ago.

 

…

 

All of that slips away when they start to head towards the room itself though, all of that panic below the surface starts to creep back up.

She’s still in a wheelchair. She’s still hooked up to in IV. She’s still got more skin on show than any sick person would want. And she’s about to walk into a _hall_ filled with hundreds of strangers.

There must be hundreds. There are enough rooms here for there to be hundreds.

“You’ve got this,” Raven hums when she bends over to mutter something in Clarke’s ear. “Head held high like the boss bitch you are,”

“Boss bitch?” Clarke has to laugh, has to scoff because that’s just not right.

“It’s all about showing them that you aren’t afraid,”

“But I am,” she admits, whispering it to Raven so that only she can hear it, wanting Wells and the other two not to have to deal with the pity party.

They’ve stopped a little further away from it than Clarke had anticipated needing to catch her breath. Just at the wall that carries forward to the huge double doors.

Someone bends down in front of her and Clarke expects it to be Wells but it isn’t. It’s the shy stranger with his hood thrown over his head like he’s hiding something too.

“Clarke,” he starts. She remembers that she didn’t give him her name, nor did anyone else. He just knew it. He’s crouched down like a frog, hands clasped between his spread and bent legs. “The people in there admire you. They know what you’ve been through. You’re a myth here, you’re intangible because we’ve all got our horror stories, all of us, but yours was the worst and you fucking survived it.”

His voice is calm, his voice is patient and ever so quiet. The kind of quiet that you have to crane your head to hear, the kind that you have to rely on your own ability to read lips to understand.

“You can’t categorize things like that,” she says, shaking her head. In truth, they’ve all exaggerated her story. She was the one who was allowed to be weak. She can hardly remember some of the worst times of her descent. It was her friends that carry that burden.

“Maybe not, but that doesn’t take anything away,”

“He’s right though Clarke,” Jasper intervenes on her left. “What you did is pretty impressive,”

“Does everyone know what happened?”

“No,” Raven answers, hand still clipped to her shoulder like she knows Clarke needs it. “No one knows the specifics.”

“We know you died though,”

“I didn’t _die,”_ she scowls because there they go again, exaggerating it all.

“Technically you did,”

“Twice,” Wells adds on even if he looks like he doesn’t want to say it.

He’s looking at Clarke like he’s seeing something in her that she can’t see. Maybe someday she’ll understand what that is, but right now it’s just so hard to process everything that’s going on around her.

“Doing whatever you’re about to do isn’t some small feat,” Monty says, still looking like he’s surprised that Clarke is even listening to him. “You’re allowed to be afraid. You’re allowed to need other people,”

“I’m tired of being afraid,”

“But you won’t be afraid forever,”

Her stomach grumbles and breaks whatever moment is happening between the five of them. Monty ducks his head and breaks into snickers that sound easy like everything about him does.

He stands back to his feet, looks like he’s thinking about taking Clarke’s hand for a moment but then decides against it because something in her expression must give her away. His words were enough. His words were the warm blanket she needed. The one she was craving to cover up the skin that feels so wrong on her own body.

It ticks in her head, only now as they’re about to enter the gates to the mountain, that Bellamy might be inside it, but it’s too late to go back now and if she’s going to see him then she’ll see him and that’ll be that.

“Ready Clarke?” Wells asks quietly when his hand falls to one of the double doors, getting ready to push at it even if it looks like it wouldn’t dare to budge under his weight.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she sighs back, folding her arms over her stomach so that when she gets stared at, the people won’t be able to linger on her ribs or her uncovered abdomen.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'We finally find this, then you're gone,'  
> \- Like a Fool, Kiera Knightley


	24. But I wonder, where were you?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a couple of disclaimers:  
> -I actually like Echo's character in canon, but this is a different story.  
> -The chapter count is going to go up. Significantly. Sorry if that pisses anyone off.

Wells throws open the door like they’re about to walk on to the red carpet. Clarke has a sneaky suspicion that he only does it to make her smile, because he’s never been one for grand gestures and sure, he might have changed since she last saw him, but she’s pretty confident that that’s still true.

“Welcome to the Dropship,” Jasper says when he brushes past Clarke’s chair and takes the lead in front of Wells, blocking the view Clarke has of the hall as he spins on his heels and bows grandly.

She shoos him back to standing upright, not wanting to attract any more attention than she’s already going to do.

“The what?” she asks as Raven pushes her forward slowly. They come to a level with Jasper, so they’re definitely in the room, but Clarke turns her head to him so that she doesn’t have to look at the rest of it.

“It’s what we call this place,” he shrugs and then jumps forward again, forcing Clarke to look around now.

Maybe it’s not as big as she had been expecting, maybe just about the size of the med ward which is still pretty intimidating. But it’s not like there are only a few doctors patrolling the far end of this room: no, there are probably around three dozen tables, all long and extended enough to fit twenty people on one. They’re all squeezed in tight together, with benches either side, not unlike the picnic bench that the five of them sat at once upon a time.

There are people of all ages inside, all at different stages of their meals. Some are practically ravenous from the way they are breathing in their food; some aren’t eating at all and are just chatting avidly to the others on their table.

There are children running around a far corner, looking like they’re playing ring-a-ring-a-roses in a tight circle and seeping glee into the rest of the place. Do they know what is going on around them? Do they know that their world as they know it is over? Hopefully not.

There are mothers and fathers, there are teenagers with their heads hung heavily over bowls of God knows what. There are some people who look too tired to so much as walk. Clarke knows the feeling.

It’s strange to see such normalcy in a room like this, but these people must be fully adjusted to this kind of lifestyle by now. No, it’s Clarke who is the odd one out. She’s the one who is abnormal.

And that becomes clear the second people start to take notice of the door being thrown open. It’s what Clarke would guess a visible, minute version of the butterfly effect to look like. It starts with some toddlers sat on the laps of some occupied parents, tugging on their sleeves when they see the wheelchair.

And then, after a couple of pairs of widened eyes, the whispers start. The whispers start and they don’t stop. Clarke hears her name get thrown around so much that it doesn’t sound like a name anymore. It sounds just as Monty had put it: like a legend. Unprecedented.

“Head up Clarke,” Raven mutters again as a reminder. She sounds pissed off and if Clarke could see her expression, she knows she’ll be sending anyone who dares to stare and point, looks that could kill.

She starts to push forward, steering Clarke to one side of the room so that they don’t have to weave their way down the center of it.

“Raven people are staring,” she whispers up so that she doesn’t have to just keep her gaze focused on her toes.

“Let them stare,”

“They never seen someone in a wheelchair before?”

“Something like that,” Raven smirks and opens her mouth to say something else but the thought is lost when she’s forced to halt the chair in whatever path she was taking.

Clarke’s head spins back around to find the cause for obstruction. It’s a little boy, no older than five surely, and he’s got his hands clasped behind his back as he rocks awkwardly on the heels of his boots.

Boots that are much too big for him. He’s got hair like the light from a chandelier: white yellow where the fluorescence hits.

“Hello,” Clarke says, because she can feel a hundred pairs of eyes on her and the fragile state of her might give leeway to some actions, but ignoring a kid probably isn’t one of those.

“Hello,” the boy says back, looking Clarke straight in the eyes like he’s searching for something.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

“Mom’s over there,” he shrugs, pointing to somewhere behind Clarke and she follows his tiny finger to the table. A woman, who looks thin and gaunt, like she hasn’t gotten any sleep in months, is watching them cautiously. Clarke can tell it’s her because she hasn’t got her gaze latched to her like the rest of them do. She’s watching her son as any mother would.

Clarke nods her head at the woman.

“Move it squirt,” Raven gruffs out when the boy makes no move to leave, still staring and watching Clarke as though she might get up and do a dance for him any moment now.

“I’ve got something for her,” he argues determinedly and then swings one of his hands down from behind his back to extend it straight to Clarke.

Clasped in his grip, forced to bend at an unnatural angle, is a bright pink tulip, the petals only just starting to open up.

“For you,”

He’s got fair skin, just like Clarke, and so when he blushes it’s transparent. His cheeks turn a brilliant rosy pink within the few seconds it takes for her to click on to what he’s offering her.

When she does allow the dots to connect, Clarke lets her lips turn up at the corners and she holds her hand out as far as it’ll go without completely flashing her bare stomach.

She’s still being watched. There’s no way she’s going to let them judge the state of her body too.

“Pretty,” she hums when he pushes it into her open palm, crushing it a little because he’s a boy who doesn’t understand how to use his own, finite strength yet.

“You’re Clarke Griffin?” he asks although it might be a little too late for that: he’s already given her the flower.

Clarke nods, grinning at the blush still rising across his face.

“And you are?”

“Benji. Mom said you’ve been sleeping for a really long time,”

“Yeah, I guess I have,”

“You still look tired though,” he concludes, hands drifting back to where they were, like he’s trying to make himself look taller, more impressive.

She doesn’t try to stop herself from laughing. What he says is funny, therefore she’s allowed to laugh.

“I am,”

“If I slept for a really long time, I wouldn’t be tired,”

“Maybe you’re stronger than I am,” Clarke whispers, leaning in conspiratorially so that he knows this is a secret she wouldn’t trust just anyone with.

“Mom says I need to be strong now,” Benji says back like it’s obvious. “You’ve got hair like me,”

“Kind of, yeah,”

“You’re very pretty for a girl who just woke up,”

“I am?” Clarke stutters, eyes flashing up to Raven for some reason.

“Yeah,” he grins, bouncing on the tips of his toes. “Tommy over there says he’s gonna marry you someday.”

Now he’s pointing to somewhere else, behind him this time and Clarke follows his hand again easily. Raven has started to snigger behind her.

The boy that Benji is pointing at is probably the only one in the whole room not looking at Clarke. He’s sat not too far away, looking a couple years older than the boy stood in front of her, and he’s watching the food on his plate like he might be able to set it on fire if he does so for long enough.

His face has turned purple, his palm over his forehead because he clearly would rather be anywhere else other than here.

“Yeah?” she grins when her gaze falls back to the blond before her.

“Yeah. And he’s eight so he’s probably got a better shot than I do,”

“How old are you?”

“Six,”

He says it like he should be ashamed of it, looking wistfully at Clarke and she tries not to smile because he’s taking it too seriously for her to make it into a joke.

“Well, you can go over there and tell Tommy that,” she’s whispering again and Benji leans in close so that no one else can hear it. “If I get married, I’d like my husband to be a brave one,”

“Brave?” he asks, his irises drifting up to the ceiling like he’s trying to work something out. “Like strong? Someone who isn’t scared of anything?”

“No,” Clarke answers. “Everyone’s scared of something. I just want someone who can look into the eyes of what they’re scared of. Someone who will fight to overcome it,”

“Look into the eyes?” he echoes, still calculating.

“Yeah,”

His irises tumble back down to the center of his wide eyes like a waterfall and then he’s staring at Clarke head on. And then he’s moving towards her at an impressive pace for someone so small, and he’s leaning to press the tiniest, daintiest kiss to her cheek that she’s ever felt. His lips don’t really meet the skin of her face because he’s moving away in the same moment that he makes contact, but it’s still a peck as far as he is concerned.

“Brave,” he grins and then he’s running away, chuckling and gleeful all the way over to his mother who scoops him up in her arms. Clarke watches him gush his head into her chest, still smiling all over in the cheesiest way and she can’t help but grin too when Raven barks a laugh.

“Come on Griffin,” she breathes, almost giggling like she’s exasperated. “Let’s get you some food.”

Clarke holds the tulip tighter in her hand when Raven starts moving and adds the lily she brought with her to it, keeping them both together so that she doesn’t lose either. She notices that the other three have wondered off and starts to look around in a panic before she sees them.

Wells is walking over from the far end of the hall, where Clarke can see a serving station now that they’re getting closer to it, and Monty and Jasper are following diligently, but distractedly behind him.

They’re carrying five trays between them and they’re heading over to one of the long tables, the kind that you find in elementary school cafeterias.

Raven pushes Clarke over to meet them and she isn’t one hundred percent sure, but the way people are watching her is starting to become easier to ignore. It’s still there, in her periphery, but if she doesn’t want to see it then her mind has begun to find a way to block it out.

Wells takes a seat on the end of one of the benches, placing one of the trays at the head of it, and Jasper and Monty wriggle in opposite him. If this is the Ark table then they’re certainly doing a good job of looking like they’re meant to be here.

Maybe if they’re convincing enough, they’ll be allowed to stay.

Raven doesn’t struggle to maneuver Clarke into the space at the end of the table. She knows that this is where she has to go, being in a wheelchair, but she can see all the way to the other end of it and there are faces that she doesn’t recognize all along.

It’s unnerving, having to look and wait for the strangers to start staring here, but these ones do it a little more subtly than everyone else. They are still sneaking glances every now and then, making sure that she’s still here after they’ve taken their eyes away for a few seconds, but that filler time is spent like normal. Looking to their food, speaking to the person next to them. Mundane, if not for the small glimpses that flutter like a strobe light.

There are around a dozen people at this table, not including the new additions. There’s enough space between the two groups for it to be noticeable, for Clarke to stand out further.

She looks down at the tray Wells has given her. It kind of resembles the way prison food is served, with different shapes outlining different portions of different servings.

The green mass is what sticks out the most, even if she’s only been given a couple spoonful’s of it.

“S’better just to get the algae over and done with,” Jasper tells her, sat closest on her right, as he tears at a bread roll with his teeth unashamedly.

A couple seconds later, he makes a sound, a lot like an ‘oof’ and winces, reaching down under the table to clutch at his shin. Monty smiles at him sweetly, too sweetly to be innocent.

Clarke grins at Monty when he winks at her.

“What did the kid want?” Wells asks, smirking at the pair across from him before he turns to Clarke. The look in his eyes asks a different question. Asks a thousand different questions. ‘Are you alright? Is this too much? You wanna go back?’

Clarke shakes her head to all of them.

“To marry her,” Raven beams, slurping up a mountain of the algae and then letting her face tear itself up after she’s swallowed it. Not good then.

“Typical,”

“That’ll die down eventually,”

Murphy’s voice comes from nowhere and Clarke feels her spine actually physically relax when she hears it. He drops his own tray down next to Monty, nodding at them to shift further along the bench towards Clarke as though there’s no room for him.

There’s enough room for another six people between the five of them and the rest of the ‘team’ but they still do what he gestures for them to do.

After he’s sat down, he glances casually over to Clarke, another thousand questions in _his_ eyes and this time, Clarke opts for a small shrug. A barely there answer, but an answer nonetheless.

“They were all in love with Raven when we first got here,”

She’s glad he isn’t addressing the fact that she’s here. He’s acting like she’s been here all along, like this isn’t weird. Like she isn’t sticking out like a sore thumb.

“You know,” Jasper starts, then pauses to swallow the food in his mouth. “If you two were to make out in front of us all, I’d say you’d get at least twenty people fainting,”

“Tempting,” Raven hums, jabbing at something on her plate with her fork.

“Why aren’t you eating?” Wells asks quietly when he notices that Clarke’s hands are still wrapped tightly around her waist.

“Are people still watching me?” she mumbles, fingers pinching the skin at her sides so that she has an excuse to close her eyes.

He looks around the room for a moment, so Clarke doesn’t have to. When he meets her gaze again, he winces.

“I don’t know if it’d be better to lie or not,”

“Not,” Clarke sighs, but she’s already got her answer. She’s still got at least two hundred people looking at her like she’s something in a zoo, waiting for her to slip and fall and crash again.

“Try the algae,” he offers because he doesn’t have anything better right now. “It might be a good distraction,”

So she does, keeping one arm held close to her stomach as the other one clutches on to a spoon and dips into the mush that bleeds green liquid when she pokes at it.

It tastes just as bad as it looks, the only way to describe the flavor is, well… green. Just green. But it’s the consistency that really makes her want to throw up. It’s like a sponge that dissipates on the tongue, into shreds of material that doesn’t feel like it is in any way digestible.

She tries, really does try, not to make it seem like this is the worst thing she’s ever tried to eat, but when Monty smiles at her, a little apologetic, Clarke knows she couldn’t pull it off.

Jasper bursts out laughing at the sight of her, but the sound breaks away when the door swings open again. Clarke looks to it like a magnet, in the same way they all do.

A man, tall and buff in a way that looks synthetic walks in. All of that muscle can’t be normal, surely. He makes even Roan look lanky, makes Wells look like a twig. He’s got darkened skin, his hair gone, and he’s menacing in a way that’s just not controllable. Not when you look like that.

He leads the way forward, and so Clarke doesn’t see her until they are in the room properly. But she manages to follow the hand linked to his, probably about a third of the size, all the way up to the face of a girl she knows too well. Octavia doesn’t catch Clarke before Clarke catches her, which is probably for the best because it does give her a few more moments of preparation.

“Clarke,” Raven starts but it’s drowned out by Octavia’s eyes falling to hers and she stops in her tracks as though she’s seen a ghost. Maybe that’s what Clarke is to them now: nothing corporeal, nothing here.

“It’s fine,” Clarke gushes and drops her head before Octavia’s expression can shift to anything other than surprise.

“No it’s not,”

“You’re right,” she turns to Jasper, wincing when she tries to swallow the rest of the algae. “It’s disgusting.”

The man seems reluctant to tear his eyes away from the entrance and when he looks at Clarke, the creases under his eyelashes seem to be crinkling wearily. He nods his head, grunts, and watches her for a moment too long like she might turn to flames if he looks away.

“Are they coming over?” Clarke asks quietly to Wells once she’s cleared her throat.

“She looks like she wants to talk to you,” he mumbles back with a hand over his mouth, not even bothering to hide how he’s whispering into Clarke’s ear.

“No,”

“Okay,”

She doesn’t watch him or watch whatever he does but Wells seems content with it anyway because his palm comes to rest on her knee below the table in reassurance.

The whispers start to get louder all around them, and Clarke doesn’t stop staring daggers at her plate of food because she’s sure they’re about Octavia and she doesn’t need to know any more than that.

But then she hears Murphy snarl, growling predatorially low in his throat and that isn’t just to do with Octavia.

“What is _he_ doing here?”

She’s slow. She’s got weights on her reflexes that make everything feel like it’s moving in slow motion, so when Clarke manages to drag her gaze over to the door, the delay only lets her see a fleeting, shadowed glimpse of someone stalking out of the room. It’s a man. He’s got black curly hair. He’s walking with a gait that she would recognize anywhere. He’s practically sprinting, like he’s just walked in and done a full one eighty within seconds.

“She doesn’t own the place,”

That’s a new voice. Clarke definitely hasn’t heard that one.

She stops waiting, with her mouth hanging wide open, for Bellamy to come back because the tone the woman in front of her uses is too threatening to ignore. It’s heated and accusatory and unforgiving.

She’s sat down, closest to Murphy, on the other end of the gap between the two groups. She’s wearing heavy eyeliner all around her eyes, and Clarke’s first reaction is to question why on Earth she’s bothering to wear make up now. How she got it in this kind of place is unanswerable.

The woman, who looks maybe a year or two older than Clarke, has got a completely blank expression, and her beauty is, in a word, effortless. She doesn’t need the eye make up to look stunning. Her cheekbones are slender, without looking gaunt. Her eyes are wide and piercing. Her lips are naturally rosy, and her hair is tumbling down her back in dead straight strands. Her posture is impeccable, and Clarke can see that, even from sitting down, she’s slender and tall like she belongs on a runway.

But something in her scrutiny makes Clarke want to wilt. She isn’t watching Clarke in the same way the rest of the people in the room are, not with admiration or intrigue and not even with the curiosity that Clarke manages to catch on those that look the most uninterested. No, this woman looks bored if anything. Like Clarke is nothing special, like she’s worthless.

“Shove it Echo,” Murphy warns, heated and tired as though he’s had to say it a hundred times over.

Echo. It’s nice. It’s a bit blunt, a bit fairy-tale, but it’s still nice. The woman herself, doesn’t look so nice. Or at least, like she doesn’t want to be nice.

Echo rolls her eyes and makes a face as though the gesture pains her, as though it was Murphy’s fault for making her do it. She braces herself on the table with both hands and then pushes upward, stalking out of the room with the heels of her boots clacking like she’s wearing stilettos.

“Do I want to know?” Clarke asks somberly, gaze drifting back to the door to see if Bellamy has returned.

“Probably not,”

Octavia and the man, his hand still grasped firmly in hers, take seats at the complete other side of the table, both of them avoiding Clarke’s gaze as much as possible. Good, she thinks. She doesn’t want them to be fake around her. If they don’t want her then they shouldn’t even try to act like they do.

“When are you heading out next?” Monty tries to ask after a few moments have passed, sounding just as awkward as Clarke feels. She keeps the flowers gripped close to her chest, hoping they might give her something.

“Mission plan’s in a couple days,” Raven shrugs back, resolutely ignoring the girl at the end of the table just as much as Clarke is. “We’ll find out then.”

“You’re leaving?”

“It’s our job, Clarke,”

“Right. Sorry,”

“You don’t need to apologi-”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Murphy drops his fork on to his plate with a clatter, slamming it down a little too forcefully for it to have been an accident. He rises to his feet without sparing a glance to any of the others and Clarke watches him, confused, until she catches sight of the door swinging open once more.

That damn door. Forever loose on the hinges like it might fall off. That’s because it weighs too much, Clarke notices. It’s too heavy.

And in he walks, face just as expressionless as the woman next to him. His hair is just as rabid as it was the other night, he’s wearing pretty identical clothes to then as well. Bruises and cuts still mark up his face in the colors of a vintage rainbow, but it’s his eyes that Clarke cranes to see.

They’re probably heavier than the door. She knows what it looks like when somebody hasn’t gotten a wink of sleep in days, and Bellamy looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks. He looks awful. She knows why he wouldn’t let her see him the other night; he didn’t want her to see him broken.

“Murphy sit down,” Raven snaps, not even bothering to throw a glance over at Bellamy, nor to Echo, who is walking on his side, not touching him but standing closer than Clarke would have expected. They are both making their way to the other side of the hall, to get him food she’s guessing, and he’s got his eyes trained to the floor like he’s waiting for it to swallow him whole. “Don’t you dare start anything right now,”

“Couldn’t even give her a day to get used to it,”

“Murphy,” Clarke tries when she sees his hands start to form fists. “It’s fine. This was going to happen at some point, right? It’s not like we can avoid each other.”

He makes a scoffing sound, and Clarke realizes her mistake pretty quickly after she’s said it. Of course they can avoid each other: Bellamy managed to do that for four months.

“Don’t even let him see you down,” Jasper whispers, watching something over her head as it moves over the counter and the serving station.

“You know?” she asks, eyes flashing up. She can’t even begin to think what Jasper might know about her and Bellamy because she still has absolutely no idea what’s going on between the two of them herself.

All she knows is he left her. He hasn’t tried to see her and hasn’t wanted to, even after she got out. That’s enough, at the end of the day, for Clarke to know things must be over. Not that they are, not at all. She’s too raw for that, too confused right now.

“Not a lot. It’s not something we talk about, but everyone saw Wells smash him up the other day,” Jasper shrugs, unapologetically. “We all heard the things they were saying. I guess it’s not hard to understand that he’s a dick,”

“He’s not a dick,” she argues instinctively. “He’s not.”

Clarke wants to look over to him so badly. She wants to know if seeing her has made the bruises on his face fade any more, because that’s the kind of effect they had on each other once upon a time.

“You fought him in here?” she asks, turning to Wells to distract herself from the man behind her, drawing her to him like a moth to a flame.

He keeps his eyes trained on his plate, chewing obnoxiously on one side of his mouth as he thinks and then nods a couple times.

“I’m still not sorry for hurting him,” he says lowly. “I know what I did was wrong, and I’ve still got that gross nagging in my stomach because what I did wasn’t me but… I’m not sorry.”

“Should have hit him harder,”

“Murphy,” Raven must kick him under the table after she’s hissed impatiently, because he winces slightly and moves to shoot her daggers.

“Careful,” Jasper says once he’s grinned at Raven momentarily, because he looks back to the space behind Clarke and she guesses she’s going to be in trouble any time soon. “Quick, say something.”

“Say what?”

“Anything,”

“What’s that going to do?”

It seems to be enough, even if Clarke is looking at him like he’s grown another head, because Jasper bursts out into this sickeningly dramatic laugh, convincing enough if it were to be heard from far enough away, and he moves to wipe imaginary tears from his eyes, winking at Clarke when his hand is blocking one of his eyes from view.

“What are you doing?” she whispers.

“Showing him that you’re doing just fine without him,”

But she’s not. She’s never felt worse. Never. And there’s not going to be a way to hide that.

“Now smile like I’ve said something funny,”

She does try to grin. It might look a little pained, a little forced, but it’s good enough for Jasper to smile back and go back to eating, content with how the exchange must have looked: like two people who don’t care about dealing with their issues.

“When d’you get good at this?” she asks with a mouth full, using food as an excuse to duck her head lower.

“Girls didn’t like me,” he shrugs back. “I learnt how to make it look like I didn’t care.”

But Bellamy did like her. He does. Surely, that is no different now.

She knows they’re getting closer and that they’ll have to brush past her to get to Octavia and the man towering at her side. It’ll be the closest she’s been to Bellamy yet. Maybe she could reach out and grab his arm?

Maybe if she makes him look at her properly, Clarke can help him see that, whatever it is that she’s taken from him, she can give it back.

Raven clears her throat before the pair behind Clarke get too close, they must be in her peripheral vision somewhere.

“We don’t need a scene right now,”

“I’m already enough of one,” Clarke snarks, pointing around to the eyes that follow her like spotlights.

“Not you I’m worried about,” Raven mumbles, eyes flicking only for a moment over to Wells’ bruised knuckles and the scabbing scar all over his nose.

“I’m not stupid enough to do anything else,” he rolls his eyes right back at her. “Roan let me off once, he won’t do it again.”

Clarke knows when Bellamy and Echo are close enough to her because both Jasper, Monty, and Wells suck in audible breaths and hold them close. Echo shoves roughly past Jasper, bouncing off of his shoulder for no reason at all, hard enough to push him along the bench.

Clarke doesn’t look up.

Bellamy must be following behind Echo because he still isn’t mildly visible even when Echo has gone to sit down next to the man opposite Octavia, at one corner of the table.

She can hear his breathing before she sees him, knows that no matter what they’ve all been saying, this might just be harder for him than it is for Clarke. That ragged scratchiness that she’s learned to associate with moments that were just for them, gives her hope.

But he’s walking past their end of the table like they are nothing to him. Bellamy breezes past, a stranger. A complete stranger and the few months she knew him for get wiped out in that. It’s like they never happened to him. It genuinely is as though she’s fabricated the whole thing.

Wells breathes out coolly, but it’s a sigh of relief that comes too soon because the next thing Clarke knows is Bellamy isn’t just walking along the edges of them, scared to touch them and floating like he’d rather be anywhere else, no he trips violently enough that even Clarke shoots her head up to see what’s happened.

He was behind Murphy when it happened. The man in question has spun, so that he’s got one leg on either side of the bench, straddling it like he’s just trying to talk over to Clarke, but she sees the mischief clear on his face.

Bellamy regains his footing, saving face enough that he doesn’t go tumbling all the way to the floor, but it’s a harsh enough trip that the water in the plastic cup he’s got goes sloshing out over Murphy’s head.

Time slows again, in that way that Clarke has started to become used to. There’s a violent clatter of a metal tray against the table, smashed down without care, and then there is the sound of chair legs scraping against the ground as Murphy is brought up to his full height.

He’s got Murphy by the collar, leaning him over the table and the bench so that Murphy has to grip on to Bellamy’s shoulders to stay up.

Clarke doesn’t dare look at Bellamy’s face- she can’t- but she takes in the aggressive stance, the way Murphy’s weight and muscle has never held a match to Bellamy’s.

They are face to face, nose to nose, and Clarke doesn’t understand how he can stand another confrontation like this, after Wells beat him so brutally to a pulp.

Murphy punches Bellamy in the stomach in an attempt to get out of the grasp, but it’s like his chest is made of steel. He doesn’t react and instead seethes loudly.

Raven and Octavia stand up, on mirroring sides of the table, both wearing equal looks of outrage and just for a moment, Clarke is reminded of how fluidly they used to work together. She remembers the history between the two girls, remembers how that has all gone to waste.

“Bellamy!” Octavia yells down but he doesn’t react, he just pushes Murphy further over the table with both fists laced into his sweater.

“Murphy,”

Raven’s voice is much quieter, more of a warning but it’s too late because Murphy already pushed his luck when he tried to trip Bellamy over.

“It’s fine. He can’t do it,” he stumbles over the words, breath a little tight as he struggles minutely.

“Don’t test me,” Bellamy growls back, seemingly losing control by the second. It’s the first thing Clarke has heard him say properly this entire time. His voice doesn’t sound right though, it holds none of the emotion it used to be so full of. It sounds robotic and dangerous and unsteady.

No one moves. No one can look away. He’s a man possessed, and Murphy looks uncomfortable, looks in pain, but doesn’t look like he wants any help. Almost like he’s enjoying it. They are close enough for Clarke to hear it when he lowers his voice.

“Do it,” Murphy snarls, leaning closer to Bellamy in challenge. “Show her what you are now.”

And it sparks something in Bellamy. One of his fists tears away from Murphy’s collar and in the next moment, it’s landing solidly into his cheek along with an audible crunching sound. Murphy doesn’t cry out or anything, but Raven does.

Bellamy hits him again and Clarke still can’t look at his face.

“Bellamy stop it!” Octavia calls, marching closer now even if she’s not what everyone is seeing.

Another punch to the face and blood spurts and splashes on to Monty’s jacket.

A hand lands firm on Bellamy’s shoulder, tan and huge, and the stranger who was walking with Octavia is the one to pull him away. No matter how much he struggles, Bellamy doesn’t make it out of the man’s hold, hands drawn tight behind his back to stop him from lashing out at Murphy again.

Raven runs over to him, whipping past Clarke, and gripping his face in her hands so she can check him over, so she can stop the running nose and the bleeding lip.

The whole room is silent. Even quieter than when Clarke first came in, because she was surely only the opening act in comparison to this headliner.

She’s speechless, and so are the rest of the people on this table. So is the rest of the room.

“I saw you!” Murphy hollers at Bellamy as though they are miles apart, giving no regard to the fragility between everyone else. There’s nothing fragile between the two of them. His characteristic icy snark is gone, eclipsed by an anger that Clarke hasn’t ever seen on him so explicitly. “You don’t get to come in and do that! Not after what you’ve done,”

Jasper clears his throat as quietly as he can, nudging at Wells’ arm across the table but not quite speaking lowly enough to avoid notice.

“Me and Monty can get her out of here?”

Clarke must have frozen. She can’t even move now. She can’t do anything but watch the grappling men distantly, not really focusing on anything at all.

“He didn’t do anything,” Octavia’s voice rings out.

“Go on then, Cockroach. Tell me what you think I just did. Tell me what you think you saw,” Bellamy spits, and he spits blood. God, Wells really didn’t hold back.

“I saw you look at her like that! You don’t have the right. You went all fucking tender and ardent and... You don’t get to look at her like-”

“Like what?” But Murphy wasn’t hesitating.

There are wheels moving beneath Clarke and she only just remembers to duck her head again, so that nobody can see the war on her own face, and she misses the thing that Murphy says next because she’s out of the hall and being driven down along it like they’re running from a fire.

There is a woman and a man running towards the three of them, both of them Clarke can recognize vaguely. One looks like she’s known her forever, like she hasn’t seen her in years, and the other looks like a new friend, one that trusting is something that has only just started to seep through, something to be learnt still.

But she doesn’t get to make them out any more than that because everything fades to black.

 

…

 

She’s never going to get to wake up to silence, Clarke decides when that familiar, almost taunting, beeping trickles through the new light again. She hates the sound of her own heart now. It isn’t natural or authentic or any of the things it was while she was out on the road.

There’s a hand in hers but there is always a hand in hers, so she doesn’t react. She doesn’t care whose it is, they’ll be there for her either way and she can deal with it because she has to.

She might be weak right now. A little unsteady and feeling like she’s about to crumble from the inside, but that’s just it. If she’s going to break intrinsically, then she’s just going to have to make her walls stronger, make them impenetrable so that no one can see the fall.

The hand in hers is old. It is weary and grown tired, but everyone is tired now.

“Hey honey,”

No one calls her ‘honey’. No one but-

“Abby?”

But she saw her mother die. She saw her run into the heart of New Orleans, back to everything they’ve ever known, and she watched as she got swallowed by an apocalypse.

The body on the wrong side of her bed does a really good job of looking real, looking like it isn’t a guest. She’s sat on Wells’ side, and on the one that Murphy chose when it was just the two of them. She is sat on the side furthest from the door, the one not meant for visitors but for family.

Clarke isn’t sure that that is what they are now.

She freezes and unfreezes so quickly that she isn’t sure if it happens at all, and then Clarke lifts herself up with both hands and shifts away from the woman, tearing their hands apart because it’s too cold.

“Clarke-”

“Don’t,” she whispers, squeezing her eyes shut.

Every time. Every time she thinks she’s finally going to start feeling like this is all normal, it gets taken away in the next moment.

“How?”

It’s all she asks because it’s all she needs to ask. This is just one of those impossibilities that she’s not going to be able to wrap her head around any time soon.

“No. We don’t have to go into that right now,”

Abby Griffin’s voice is calm and structured like it always has been. Clarke can count on one hand the number of times she’s heard actual emotion seep through it.

When Clarke lost her first tooth, when her husband wrote back saying that he would have to miss Christmas that year, when they were organizing his funeral, and when she told Clarke that he’d be proud of her. Four times. Four in twenty-three years.

No. Twenty-four now. She technically aged a year in her sleep. On some meaningless day in February.

“How?” Clarke asks again, teeth gritting and heart rate rising.

There is that internal fall starting to expose itself. She’ll be thankful when she gets her pulse back all to herself, when she can mask it again.

“Clarke-”

“Where’s Wells?”

“He’s on duty,” Again, quiet and patient.

“Raven? Just get Murphy, or, or someone,”

“It’s okay, Clarke,” she says, reaching for her hand again and getting everything wrong, reading everything wrong like she always did. “I’m here for you,”

But right now, Abby is just another stranger in a sea of them.

“You’re going to tell me the truth. If you want to stay, you’re going to be honest,”

She knows she shouldn’t be reacting like this to her own mother. Thousands would kill nowadays, to have found their blood again. Clarke understands that she’s being a little too harsh and she reads that in the way Abby starts to close off, but it’s all she can do.

“What do you want to know?”

“How the fuck are you here?” Abby’s eyes drift closed when Clarke swears, wincing: she’s always hated when Clarke would swear. Somehow that had always driven the girl to do it more whenever they were around each other. “I watched you die. I mourned you,”

And it’s true. In that first week of the apocalypse, when humanity was a lost cause and she lost a part of herself that she’ll never get back, did things that she’ll never quite be able to speak about, Clarke grieved the loss of her last blood connection. The last holder of the Griffin name.

“When I left you, I just ran. There was nothing else for me to do but run. I followed a group of people who looked just as scared as we should have been-” that was always the strange thing about the two of them. When the zombies hit, neither of them panicked. Sure, Clarke had forgotten to change out of her hideous duckling pajamas, but it’s not like fear was really there in them. “and a rescue helicopter was on the roof of the hospital when I reached it. They wanted me on it because I was a doctor, and then they brought us here that night. I’m one of the first people who made this place a safe one,”

“I watched you die,”

“Clarke, you watched me run away,”

“So you’re alive?”

“Wells got here within a couple of days of the outbreak. I was depressed for a while,” she says, like she’s reading from a manual. “When I thought of you out there, alone, probably dead. He was the one who kicked me out of it, and he told me that you were strong, that you’d get here because you’ve always done what you wanted to do. He never gave up waiting,”

“He wouldn’t,”

Because, unlike her mother, Clarke’s oldest friend has courage.

“The night they brought you in was perhaps the best and the worst day of my life. I found you and lost you all over again,”

“You didn’t find me,”

“Clarke-”

“No, Abby, you didn’t find me,” And, really, honestly, she didn’t. Neither did Wells.

The people who found her were the ones out there on the road. The ones who helped her fight for her survival the whole damn time.

“This is too much,” Clarke decides when Abby’s focus doesn’t wilt, doesn’t imitate the pose of the flowers lining her cabinet.

“I understand. I can give you space if that’s what you need,”

“Thank you. For telling me yourself that you are here,”

“I thought you’d be mad that I told your friends to hide it,”

“I am,” Clarke shrugs unapologetically. “But there’s so much to be angry about right now. This doesn’t quite cut it,”

It’s strange, but it’s probably the easiest way to wound Abby. It’s not like that is something she wants to do, but old habits die hard and she always knew the quickest way to be sour. Letting her mother know that this doesn’t even shine a light to the discoveries she’s made since waking up, is harsh and uncalled for. But it’s the truth and she isn’t going to become a coward, not now after everything else.

Bellamy Blake, in a whole other lifetime, grew to be so much more than a bloodline, a forced relationship only held together by legality and genetics.

He was, in short, her spirit.

So no, if finding out she’s still got a mother should be world-tilting news then Clarke will make sure to get her head checked in one of the many examinations that she’s been getting four times a day. Because it isn’t, and it won’t be anymore.

Like everything else, her mind has truly and completely numbed.

It’s strange but as Abby lets the door swing closed and lets the latch click as softly as it will allow, the reality of her situation sinks in. It is the slap in the face that she’s been waiting for all along.

Those months, the ones she spent exploring her own heart, are finished with. The man she fell in love with has learned to live a life that doesn’t involve her, and she’s going to do the same because if there’s one thing she has learned on her trip to the other realm, it is that life is short.

She won’t waste it waiting for someone who isn’t going to show. She won’t waste her love on someone who doesn’t want it anymore.

She’s going to live, and she’s going to function, and the wound deep in her chest probably won’t ever heal but at the end of the day, she’ll do to it what she has done to every other one. She’ll cover it up, conceal it from the world, and go on fighting. She’ll be the soldier that she has been made to become.

Raven and Wells and Murphy are the only ones that are allowed to visit in the following days, the only ones that Clarke wants to be allowed to watch her last steps to recovery. They explain that she blacked out on the way back from the mess hall, but it was more of a sensory overload (for lack of better words) and nothing damaging.

They tell her she’s got about a week left in here before she’s going to be released, and she makes do with the information.

The week goes by quicker than she expected. Clarke knows that Roan, Jasper, Monty and her mother have all been to visit multiple times each, that they’ve lingered outside that door until they accepted that no, Clarke doesn’t want to see anyone right now.

Because they don’t need to watch her heal. She’ll see them when she’s normal, not when she’s a patient.

Those three are the only ones who she can bear to have around while she’s weak, and they are the right three to have because they distract her with every method they have.

They play poker, with cards found in ancient basements, and they master the whole catching food in each other’s mouths game. They learn each other in ways they’ve already done ten times over but there is time to kill and it’s probably worth doing over again.

Slowly, the medics, all strangers the she hopes she’ll never see again, wean Clarke off the painkillers. They still give her the ones that should really have been non-prescription in the old days. The ones that are mostly just a source of comfort, a source of habit.

Ones that take away pain that only comes as a memory now.

They reassure her with kind words, that she’s recovered faster than they could have expected, and that she’ll be fighting fit in no time. She believes that too, because once Clarke has accepted what she needs to do from now on, time no longer drags like it did before.

Once she stops waiting for Bellamy to knock on that door, weeks turn into days and days turn into hours, and eight mornings later, Raven comes bursting into the room with that same wheelchair and a beaming smile, an offer to take Clarke home.

And home sounds pretty good. The room doesn’t really, because it’s smaller than this one and meant for double the amount of people, but in a much more real sense, she is going home.

She’s going back to being a peer amongst her people, one of them. Hopefully not a spectacle to be gawked at but just another face in the crowd.

Clarke dismissed the wheelchair because they’d taken out her IV days ago, and her legs might not be strong, but they are at least functioning.

It is strange to actually, physically, walk for the first time to a place that isn’t just the conjoined bathroom to her private room, and steps are pretty tricky initially, but she gets the hang of it by the time they reach Ark floor.

She doesn’t have a code for the door yet- apparently every one is different so that an interface that Monty came up with can keep track of the general area of everybody at all times- but Raven holds the door open for her and they slip through as though Clarke belongs here.

As though she’s part of whatever community has grown along the base of this ground.

“I feel like I’m trespassing,” she says as they weave their way through familiar corridors, past a gym that Clarke doesn’t even want to look at.

“You’re not,”

“I know that,”

“I’ve found you everything you’ll need,” Raven shrugs, changing topic because it looks like it pains her to speak as if Clarke isn’t part of her team. “Bottom bunk okay?”

She asks it like Clarke would actually be able to get in and out of the top bunk. It makes her smile.

“Sure,”

They don’t go down to the mess hall to eat. They ask Roan if it’s okay to eat in the Ark’s little communal area, with stacked mats forming sofas, and he agrees when he thinks back to the bruises on Murphy’s and Wells’ face. He greets Clarke as though she hasn’t pushed him away all week, which makes her trust him more because he knew that he was not what she needed.

He’s the type of person you’d need when you know what you’re doing. He’s a partner in crime sort of guy, a full energy, run the world sort of guy.

She’ll thank him for all of the things he’s done when the time is right.

Officially, Clarke hasn’t accepted his offer for her to join the Ark. She knows it’d be selfish to do that right now, while she’s not physically fit enough and hasn’t held her bow in her hands in months, can’t quite bring herself to do it just yet.

She’ll accept it eventually, but not until she knows she can still fight.

Clarke’s bow was on her pillow, waiting for her, when she first entered the room she belongs to, and it looked a lot bigger than she’d always remembered. Four months is longer than she’s ever gone without shooting and she is worried about how good she’ll be after so little practice.

Sometimes it’s just better to delay the inevitable, because if she’s lost that small talent then she’ll have lost her spark and she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to live with that. Right now, it’s better to just not know at all. A couple of days is all she’ll need to gather that courage.

Roan doesn’t push her for an answer. He knows she’s already got one and he’s already talking as though she will account for a number of the Ark, already mentions the teams he’s forming that include her.

When she falls asleep in the first night, it’s without beeping and it’s without whirring that doesn’t really come from anywhere, and Clarke gets to just listen to Raven’s heavy breathing. They stay up talking for longer than they should, and neither of them mention the Blakes.

It’s too broken to talk about.

Clarke decides to shoot for something else that has been nagging at her.

“So… Wells?” is all she asks to guide the conversation in this direction. It’s all she needs to say.

Watching the bunk above her body, the way it creaks under Raven’s shifting weight and pushes the mattress through fringed rails in certain places, she waits.

“Yeah, Wells,” Raven answers, sounding relieved.

“He’s changed more than I thought he would,”

“Has he? I can’t see that,”

“What do you see?”

For some reason, this darkness, the way it swallows up everything but their whispered conversations, it invites topics that they haven’t dared touch with ten foot poles. Raven answers her like she’s been waiting to say all of this for months: she probably has. The only two other people she trusts as much as Clarke are involved in a way that makes it all a bit too complicated.

“I see the man that I could have loved in another life. The same one that always knew how to look after us. Fearless in the most… tranquil way. He’s still beautiful,”

“Gross,” Clarke hums, scrunching her nose up even if Raven won’t see it.

“I know,” she sounds like she’s grinning, talking through her flashing teeth and shy lips.

“He’s firm now,”

“He was always firm,”

“I meant like… buff,” Clarke tries to figure it out, still weirded out as she attempts to call Wells good looking, objectively. “He knows about you and Murphy,”

“I know,” Raven answers, sighing.

“He called you domestic,”

They are both grinning despite it all, because the image of Murphy living a domestic life is never one that will feel natural, that will feel like reality.

“I don’t know what to do Clarke,” she whispers long after the smiles have faded into shadows. Raven doesn’t whisper very often, and it’s not like she needs to while they are talking like they are now. But Clarke does understand why she does it. “Now that you’re back, it feels like we’re all going to be moving forward finally. What do I do now?”

“You shouldn’t have been waiting around for me. You know that right?”

“Don’t say that,” Raven snaps, lacking in venom but making up for it with the finality.

“It’s not right to rely on something like me to keep your lives moving forward,”

“True. But your argument falls apart whenever we ask you if you would have done the same thing. We all know you would have,”

“Doesn’t make it right,” Clarke huffs, folds her arm over herself, ignores the way her ribcage is starting to stretch skin over them even tighter. “And I’ve always said that all Wells cares about is that you’re happy. That we both are. If you can’t choose him, or Murphy, or anyone, neither of them are going to leave us,”

It’s a solid confirmation because sticking around like they have done for four months is different to surviving next to each other out on the road. That was a necessity. This was a choice. Murphy and Wells will always choose her and Raven. No doubt about it. After all, the four of them only truly have each other now. They are the only ones that either of them can really, truly trust.

If a tear slips away at the sad reality of that, and if her voice starts to crackle a little, Raven doesn’t mention it. Because those three might have lost someone that they had that with, had to watch her die, but somehow it’s harder to know she’s lost Bellamy.

At least when she died, they all knew that she’d rather be with them. Bellamy leaving Clarke has made it clear who he’d rather be with. And it isn’t her.

“They won’t leave us,” Raven repeats like she knows just how much Clarke needs to hear it. There’s another silence but neither of them fall asleep just yet because there’s still things they want to say and they both know it.

It does stretch out, long enough for Clarke to wipe away that one pathetic tear.

“I think I am happy,” a whisper emerges from the top bunk again, and it sounds guilty. It sounds as though she doesn’t think she deserves to feel that way. “I’ve got my people.”

Clarke wants to ask if she’s missing Octavia, but it’d be a stupid question because they both are. Maybe her and Octavia are just another impossibility now. Maybe their relationship was something that was always meant to have an ending. There seems to be a lot of those nowadays.

“Good,” Clarke says back, but it doesn’t quite fit into the conversation. There’s a reason why: it’s because she can’t say it back.

Raven doesn’t need to ask if she’s happy too. Instead she goes for, “Do you think you’ll be happy eventually?”

Honestly? Clarke doesn’t really see it as something necessary now. Happiness was always a virtue that she didn’t quite let herself accept until it forced its way in. It’s one thing for the others to want her to be happy, and it’s another to want it for herself.

“Maybe,”

She can’t even say she hopes so. She is numb, and that is all she is.

“You deserve to be happy,” Raven says, another whisper. It’s a lot to take in. “More than the rest of us. You’ve been through enough shit. You’ve already earned it,”

But it doesn’t feel like she has.

“Maybe,”

There is only one certainty anymore. And that is the four of them. Nothing else really matters. She still knows the value of her own life: not the value that her family has placed on it because they did so while they led with their hearts. Value should be cast with a clear head and a firm logic, and she knows it might be too great to them, for her to be expendable. But she doesn’t deserve to be certain.

Certainty requires strength.

And everything is a maybe.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'But I wonder, where were you?'  
> \- Maps, Maroon 5


	25. Please don't leave me lonely

The first few days of living in a world that doesn’t just consist of one bed, three people, four walls and a whole bunch of flowers is a lot of work, and it takes a lot of adjustment.

It’s a slow process but steadily, Clarke learns the hacks of how to integrate herself without truly doing that.

She prioritizes learning the structure of the base, learning the ins and outs and making a mental map of it all, because the doctors that she’s been forced to meet with daily have told her that exercises like that will help. Something about the head injury and its subsequent healing.

She spends a lot of time down in the labs with Jasper and Monty, whenever they aren’t in the restricted access areas because, she might be famous here, but they won’t let her in without permission from the people higher up.

The Commanders, Clarke learns, are very rarely seen and keep themselves to themselves an awful lot. There are six of them apparently, and now that everybody knows that she knows about Abby Griffin being alive, they also tell her that she is a commander. The lead medic on the hospital ward, but a commander too and that’s how they were able to hide her for as long as they did.

Clarke understands why they kept her away. Knowing that Abby is alive wouldn’t have helped her healing process any more than it would have hindered it.

She has avoided thinking about what it means to have her mother back around, because it’s a little too hard to keep up with the way her mind flips between being relieved that she’s still got blood left and being angry about all of the mourning she did that now seems meaningless.

Abby has kept her distance. Whether that is because she knew that that is what Clarke needed, or because that is what she had to do, Clarke will never know.

They don’t have time to mend and sew back together the fragments of their relationship anymore. It was too broken beforehand, and honestly, Clarke doesn’t see any reason to have hope for it. She knows that that is a selfish way to look at it, but at the same time, they are both on the same page with this. Abby doesn’t want her just as much as Clarke doesn’t want Abby.

Eating in the mess hall is still a pretty big struggle. She thought it might have died down by the fifth or sixth time, but people still look up every time she steps into it, and whispered conversations still get thrown over her head as though she isn’t even there.

Jasper and Monty don’t always sit at Ark table because they don’t belong there and so they can only do it when it’s really quiet, which it is most of the time that Clarke gets there too because she seems to have worked out when the busiest times tend to be, and she just avoids those.

Bellamy and Octavia exist only in Clarke’s periphery. They make a habit of staying out of the way, of turning away from the mess whenever they see that she’s already inside it and coming back twenty minutes later instead.

They both disappear for a couple days, within that first week, along with Murphy and Raven tells her that they’ve been sent out on a mission. Apparently Roan didn’t think to consider the incident between Bellamy and Murphy that happened in the mess a few days ago, or he just doesn’t care.

When they all come back, Murphy seemingly safe and sound, Clarke isn’t surprised.

Raven convinces her to try out the gym on the fourth day. They have a conversation pretty early on about Clarke’s inability to touch her bow just yet, and Raven assures her that she’ll find it when she’s ready.

Clarke was never a ‘forced workout’ kind of person. She’d jog whenever she wanted to distract herself, and hunting and ballet lessons always kept her agile, but she hated the gym.

This one is smaller than it looks from the outside, but the equipment it has is pretty decent. No treadmills or anything that would require electricity for obvious reasons, but there are sets of weights machines, dumbbells of all sizes, a few punching bags and there even seems to be a makeshift bike machine, fashioned from a few gears and pedals.

They spend an hour there and Clarke walks away from it feeling a lot better about herself than she would admit. She might have pushed herself a little too hard, creating a circuit that she wouldn’t have dreamed of completing in the old times, but her body already feels stronger even after one session.

In the days that follow that, there is rarely a time that she isn’t in there. Clarke tries to spend a few hours inside at least, managing it around whenever the others have to work for real. She supposes she’ll be given her responsibilities eventually; it’s not like there’s a shortage of people but it’s also not like there’s a shortage of jobs. They’ve just got to work out where she fits, and she’ll be off.

That’s why she pushes so hard in the first week, because she won’t get time like this afterwards. There are no signs of reformed muscle along her arms just yet, and her ribs still stick out horrendously, the traces of tummy fat- the kind that she used to sort of like in a weird way- gone.

But she also carries with her an ache in every part of her body, and it lets Clarke know that soon enough, she might be back to what she was before.

In all honesty, for the sake of full disclosure in her mind, working out is the only thing that takes her away from the dreams that have started to arise. Sleepless nights are becoming more and more regular, and the nightmares spring as though bought from a candy store, all kinds of varieties and flavors and she never knows what to expect.

Never knows what to expect apart from the body drenched in sweat the following morning, teeth that crackle because she has them clenched so tightly through the witching hour, and tears built behind her eyes because she can’t remember how to cry properly.

It’s the nights where he shows up that are the worst. Those are the only ones that never involve any walkers, because she doesn’t need them to sow terror through her if she’s got the memory of him. The nights where he leaves her, those make her never want to go to sleep again.

Life becomes routine. Wake up, shower, eat, find Monty and Jasper (who always seem to come as a matching pair- you never quite get one without the other), train, train some more, shower, hang out with whoever she can find, whoever she knows, eat, shower again, sleep, regret sleeping, wake up. It is boring and repetitive, and it doesn’t take long for Clarke to start craving the life of risk that she’d been leading before.

There is still always that something missing, she’s still broken. But she makes do because she has to.

When Clarke makes her knuckles bleed one day from all of the exercises she’s doing with the punching bags, nobody questions it. When she blacks out on another, from overexertion, Wells gives her a stern telling off but nothing more.

She’s forced herself to like the pain, because emotionally she is numb, and relaxation won’t feel right anymore.

Change comes on the twelfth day of leaving the hospital room, in the form of a tepid knock on her bedroom door.

She is changing, having emerged in only a towel from the shared bathrooms because she knew that this is a time where most people are off doing things. For example, the people on Ark are either out on missions, guarding, or recovering. Clarke has learnt that those are the three responsibilities that come with the position.

The sound comes when she is shuffling into some cargo pants, not the camo ones that she sees Bellamy and a few of the others wearing whenever she catches glimpses, but plain black and so long that she has to roll them up a few times.

She has held on to the sports bra that Roan gave to her, because it is the only one that she’s been able to find that fits, but there’s no way that she’s going to dare wear only that around anyone who isn’t Raven, because no one needs to see the ugly skin it exposes.

Clarke lets the person on the other side of the door wait for as long as it takes to throw an olive tank top over her head, and she hastens to tie her hair messily before she opens it.

Barefooted and already aching from the five hour workout, she stumbles over to the door. That’s one thing she hasn’t quite managed to crawl back. She never really had grace before she died, but afterwards it’s like she epitomizes clumsy. Maybe it’s because once her brain and her body became disconnected, those ties will always be somewhat severed.

Slowly, Clarke has been able to come to terms with the fact that she died. She’s heard it be said enough behind her back by strangers who really shouldn’t get to know, and on paper she has accepted it. She died, and then she came back to life. In reality, she doesn’t know if she’ll ever fully understand what that means.

She catches herself on the door handle and pulls it down, expecting it to be either one of her neighbors or Roan, because they’re the only ones that have ever visited.

She is in no way prepared to see Octavia Blake on the other side of it, stood tall and straight, looking as effortless as ever and using one hand to clutch at her other arm, covering her bicep, one that Clarke tries not to envy.

Her hair is tossed back into a ponytail, she’s got red marks on both shoulders like imprints of a heavy rucksack. There mustn’t be any need to wear fleeces anymore, there’s no more protection from the straps.

Clarke knows that she should close the door, maybe swing it a little too hard just for dramatic effect, but having Octavia only a few steps away seems to make something in her body freeze.

All she can do is stand on the spot, in pants that really don’t belong on a frame as gentle as hers is now, and let her mouth hang open in shock.

Octavia doesn’t look happy to see Clarke, but she doesn’t look angry or sad either. She just looks… curious. Eyes flitting all over her like she’s trying to learn Clarke all over again. Well, Clarke won’t grant her that satisfaction.

“Wrong door,” she says, as tersely as she knows how once she’s figured out how to form words again.

Octavia looks confused for a moment, and Clarke harnesses that small amount of time to push the door forward, not caring if it slams in the other girl’s face. Something wedges itself between the wall and the swinging door though, and Clarke looks down to find a brown leather boot thrown forward, a contrast to her own bare feet.

Octavia pushes the door open once more, leaves her hand resting on the face of it so that it doesn’t dare to close again. It forces Clarke further into her own room, the one that feels a lot more dim in comparison to the glaring white lights in the corridor outside, those that frame Octavia’s silhouette.

Neither of them say anything. They both just wait for the other one to do something, watching each other like they’re about to duel. Eventually Octavia caves, and Clarke takes it as a small victory.

Her shoulders slump and her feet shuffle forward slightly, not enough to bring herself into the room.

“I heard you got out,”

It’s a stupid thing to say. Of course Clarke got out. Even if the girl in front of her hadn’t been going out of her way to avoid her, they were both in the mess hall when Bellamy punched Murphy. It’s something said because there is too much else to say. It’s pathetic.

“Looks like it,” Clarke nods, flicks her gaze over to the bow still slung on the edge of her bed, and back over to Octavia to wait for her to continue in whatever act they’re both playing.

Wait for her to keep pretending like she isn’t just going about her life as though they never knew each other, as though they are nothing to one another, as though they have never had to rely on one another.

“How are you feeling?” Octavia asks, foot sweeping along the floor subtly. At least she is meeting Clarke’s eyes.

“Like there aren’t enough drugs in the world that could make me normal again,”

Shoot for the truth. It’s not like lying will help anything.

“Sounds about right,”

“Does it?” Clarke challenges, feeling her eyebrow lifting suspiciously because there is nothing right about that.

The room suddenly feels a lot smaller than it does when Raven is in here, and she feels herself drift over to the chest of drawers opposite the bed- the only other thing that can really fit in here.

She leans down on to it and ignores the handles that cut into her back. Octavia stays by the door, hand still on it because she knows that if she lets it go, it will swing closed between the two of them.

Clarke thinks she can read on guilt on the other girl’s features for a moment, flickering and temporary. Her voice isn’t light today. Not like Clarke remembers it being.

There is silence, enough for grasshoppers that aren’t here to start chirping.

“S’been a while,”

Try again.

“Funny,” Clarke smirks but she can’t find any humor in it. “It feels like yesterday,”

“To you maybe,”

Octavia takes a few steps into the room, flicks a switch that turns the light on because Clarke hadn’t had the chance to do so, and the unshaded bulb is dimmer and yellower than any of the ones outside. It’s got the kind of sixties kitchen feel to it. Taking to leaning against the ladder of Raven’s bunk, she doesn’t make an attempt to keep her face blank. At least she’s granting Clarke that courtesy.

“Roan told me you’re the newest recruit,” she shrugs, balancing against a couple of the rungs.

“He shouldn’t have. I don’t know yet,”

For some reason, Clarke feels dirty about being an official part of the team just yet. She doesn’t belong here in the same way the others do. For a moment, she wonders if that means Bellamy knows too, and then her chest starts hurting too much, so she erases him from her mind.

“He seems to think you’re going to be his next prodigy,” Octavia says, sounding like she doesn’t actually care about that.

“Prodigy?”

“He’s a leader. He knows you’re a leader too,”

So simple. Always just so simple.

“Maybe prodigy is the wrong word,”

Clarke doesn’t say anything, just hums shortly and waits for the real reason as to why Octavia is in her room. She’s accepted that they aren’t coming back. They don’t need to rub salt in the wound by making casual drop-ins.

“Clarke?”

Her voice has changed after the few loaded minutes between the two of them speaking. She’s back to the Octavia she knew before, voice innocent and young, voice vulnerable.

“What?” she snaps, because she’s not ready for this. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be ready for this.

Raven and Murphy had four months to adjust to whatever has gone on between them all; they were in the center of it. Clarke has just been hit in the face with it all and she still has no idea, she’s still so in the dark.

“Are you… I want to know if you’re okay,”

She feels herself snort.

“You have got to be kidding me,”

Clarke storms over to the door from where she has got her arms folded across her chest, and she yanks at it, waving the other hand- the one that Octavia had cleaned out over and over again- to gesture for the way out. To make it clear that she wants to be alone.

It clicks in Octavia’s head, because she stands and holds herself up straight but doesn’t make a move to leave.

“Clarke I-” she tries, sounding apologetic already. Good. At least she knows that what she’s done is wrong.

That shred of remorse, of acknowledgement is what makes Clarke shove the door closed with all the strength she has.

“Where were you, O? Huh? Where were you?”

She says it a little too loudly for the small walls of the room but it’s a question that she hasn’t gotten an answer to yet, and she needs it. There’s always that underlying question too, the one that she probably won’t ever voice. _Where was he?_

Octavia opens her mouth but stands there for a moment too long without saying anything.

“They treat me like I’m a myth here, like I’m not real. Nobody, _nobody_ , acts as though I’m just normal. I mention you and they close off before I can even finish saying your names,” Clarke is stepping forward, hands balled in fists at her sides. Octavia doesn’t look down to her feet, just watches and winces occasionally. “I thought I was _dead_ when I woke up. I felt dead. You know that right?” But she doesn’t and that’s the whole point; she wouldn’t know that because she wasn’t there. “I had nothing of myself when I woke up. So where were you?”

She asks it again, this time as nothing more than a mumbled inquiry, it’s all she can do. Octavia’s eyes are narrowed, trying to work something out.

She clears her throat and they’re both basically the same height so neither can tower over the other as much as they should be.

“Our mom died, Clarke,”

It’s not an answer to her question and she did already know that, but it’s more than either of them have said to her so far so she accepts the opening to a conversation.

“In the weeks before we got here, she died,” Octavia doesn’t sound anywhere near as broken up about that fact as Clarke would expect her to. It’s something else that has exhausted her. Clarke doesn’t really have to guess at what that is. It’s always going to be him.

“Was she bitten?” she asks, chewing her lip.

Octavia shakes her head and, once again opens her mouth and it’s like there is a short circuit in between her brain and her lips because she delays the speech again.

“No. She slit her wrists,” Octavia answers slowly, drawing each word out. “Apparently she didn’t see the point anymore. Nobody told you?”

She sounds strangely surprised about that. Sure, Clarke knew that their mother had died but she hadn’t known it’d be like that. For some reason, that death sounds worse. It takes her a moment to realize that it isn’t surprise in Octavia’s voice, it’s anger too.

“No. They didn’t.”

“We were never a very close family. Not in the normal sense anyway, but we were still a family and we lost her. We grieved Clarke. On our own.”

“On your own?”

“Yeah. It was rough,”

There isn’t an accusation there, not blatant, not directed to Clarke perhaps. There had been five of them after all.

“Octavia…” she starts but doesn’t really know where she’s planning to go with it.

“It’s… I won’t tell you it’s okay. You don’t deserve to be lied to,” she admits, and Clarke feels the hold of her body gentle at those words. “It’s not okay but I’ve made it through,”

“I’m sorry,” Clarke says because it’s the truth. They’d been trying to get back to their mother that whole time, just like she had been doing with Wells. If she’d gotten here just to find out that he’d killed himself in the days before her arriving, she probably would have never gotten over it.

But the Blakes were always strong, and if anyone can make it through something like that then it would be them.

“I know,” Octavia lifts one of her shoulders up to make it look like this can be casual, but it can’t. “Clarke?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry too. I’m really… really sorry,”

She sounds like she genuinely believes what she’s saying. Clarke doesn’t know why she still can’t forgive her.

“I’m just so confused. It’s like waking up on another planet,”

“I should have been there when you woke up,” Octavia says, guilt seeping through in waves now.

“Yeah,” Clarke answers. She should have been. Her own voice is hoarse.

“You’re not gonna ask me about Wells?” she asks next, and then the broken nose floods back and Clarke is forced to remember how all of that happened. “If you want to hit me, I guess I get it. It’s the least I could do,”

“I’m not going to hit you,”

“You sure?” she seems quite disappointed about that. “I feel pretty shitty about the whole thing.”

“Good.” Clarke says. She isn’t going to give her an easy way out of it all. “You should feel shitty about it.”

“He was killing Bell. I had to do something,”

Just that name. That’s all it takes. Her and Octavia were the only ones to ever call him that, and now it’s one of those things that Clarke doesn’t have anymore. No one speaks this outrightly about Bellamy, not to Clarke at least, no one dares touch the topic of him with a ten foot pole.

Now she sees why. Each time, it breaks her just that bit more and it must be clear on her face because sadness flashes over Octavia’s and she stutters.

“Clarke-”

“It’s… I won’t lie. It’s not okay,”

She can only repeat words she’s just heard, or she won’t be able to say anything at all.

Octavia clears her throat again, takes the time to get everything in order and Clarke manages to catch on to how she doesn’t quite understand much of it either.

“Mom killed herself because we weren’t with her. He was torn apart, and you died Clarke,” she says it like Clarke had forgotten all of a sudden. “I pulled through- it was hard, and you not being there made it harder- but I did it. Bellamy, he’s… he’s lost,”

And he seems lost. Every time Clarke has gotten a small glimpse of him, that is what he has become each time. He seems distant, and numbed, and lost.

“He needs me,” Clarke says simply. She doesn’t know if it’s true, but something inside of her is pretty confident in it.

“He is the most stubborn man you’ll ever meet,”

“We needed each other,” she carries on, unable to ignore how much the two of them have hurt her.

“It’s not your fault,” Octavia tries and it’s a strange thing to say but it rings so deeply within Clarke.

Raven and Murphy and Wells, they all think that she is the victim in this. They wouldn’t dream of stopping to consider that maybe she hurt Bellamy just as much as he hurt her. For different reasons of course; he had a choice.

“Isn’t it? Octavia?” she prompts when she doesn’t get an answer. “Why won’t he see me now? He left me,”

Saying it out loud is another kind of pain. It’s concrete.

And looking into the face of a girl that she’s formed a trust with, that very few people will ever understand, Clarke starts to understand the depth of this shitstorm. This is what has made Octavia so exhausted, so devastated.

“I wish I could give you an answer,” there is not a doubt between them, that that is the truth. “Me and him… things have changed between us all. He won’t talk to me about anything,”

So who does he have?

“Remember when we first met?” Octavia asks, slumping down on to Clarke’s bunk heavily, all of that tentative front dissolved away now. Clarke sits next to her, both of them having to duck their heads because the gap between the beds isn’t quite big enough for the position to be comfortable.

She nods. “You told me he didn’t want to be happy anymore,”

“Yeah. But it’s worse this time because, well, when you were dead he lost his drive. He just gave up on everything. He lost you, lost our mother, and Murphy and Raven were always yours before they were his. He started to eat, sleep, breathe keeping me alive because that was all he knew. He’s lonely and he won’t tell me anything. The day before I found out you’d woken up, he changed again. He wasn’t nothing anymore, he just became so angry and so…”

She glances up to Clarke for the first time, must read how hard all of this is to hear, because she starts to stand up and moves a hand to hang at her neck, the way her brother would do if he were here.

“I get it if you want me to leave,” Octavia says quietly, as though she’s just realized what is happening between them. She’d slipped so easily into pouring her heart out to Clarke, slipped so far she’d forgotten what they are to each other now.

She spins on the flat heels of her clunky boots, but Clarke doesn’t let her get any further away as she shoots her hand out to clutch at Octavia’s wrist.

“Wait!” she startles, then learns to compose herself. “Don’t go. I, um, I don’t know how to be alone right now.” She so rarely has to be. Only when she’s in the gym and she works hard enough in there that she can forget about everything else. “It sounds pathetic.”

“It doesn’t sound pathetic,”

If anything, Octavia sounds relieved, like she needs to be around Clarke just as much as Clarke needs to be around _someone_.

“It’s just… dreams. Each day it’s harder to figure out what’s real and what isn’t. He’d have known what to say; he always did,”

“I don’t know how to get through to him Clarke. He’s- he’s just trying to change so much, and I know he hasn’t, not really, and no one can see that. He’s just lost himself and I’m so angry that he-”

“You’re angry?”

She takes a deep breath and sits back down next to Clarke.

“He was a better man out there. And that wasn’t even solely because of you. Sure, you inspired him to do better, but that drive was always there, you just let him know that he has so much more. Because he has such a good heart, Clarke, and I think he’s wasting it on self-pity.”

“But I’m alive,” Clarke says because it’s obvious. She doesn’t get why it still feels like she’s gone.

“I know you are,”

“And he knows too,”

“I don’t understand it either. I don’t have any answers. All I do know is we’ve both let you down in ways… I don’t know how to make up for,”

“You had your reasons,” Clarke tries to argue, not to comfort or to excuse. She’s not going to minimalize what they did.

“No reason is good enough. It never would be,” and the way Octavia says it, there’s a finality there that gives Clarke the answer that she needs. She’s right, no reason is going to be good enough for abandoning them like that. Raven and Murphy probably needed the Blakes just as much as Clarke did, just as much as the siblings needed them, and they were the ones who left.

They were the ones who punched the hole through Clarke’s heart. She let herself fall in love and he ruined it. And he knows it. And he’s burning up, but she can’t help, because he didn’t help, and it has got to work both ways.

When Octavia leaves, an awkward goodbye and no promise to return lingers in the air. Clarke understands where her loyalties lie, and it isn’t on this side of the Ark. It couldn’t be.

If Bellamy would have just fucking come and found her when it mattered, if he would just stop pretending like she means nothing to him, then none of this shit would be happening. There were so many nights where just the thought of him by her side was enough to put Clarke at ease.

She knows it was both ways, knows that she helped him just as much as he did.

She knows that they were _good_ for each other. This, all of this distance isn’t _good_.

Clarke falls asleep pretty soon after Octavia closes the door behind herself. It doesn’t matter if it’s only three in the afternoon; nobody needs her for anything right now. That’s just how this place works- you’re only here if someone wants you to be here, if someone needs you and no one needs her now. Not anymore.

Sleeping is worth absolutely nothing in the end. She makes it ten minutes, knows that thanks to the cheap watch that Roan found in the stores for her, before the dreams start.

Tonight he doesn’t show up, which is good because Clarke is pretty used to that by now. Instead, she’s trapped in a building, not like this one. It’s dark and abandoned and it doesn’t have that same stink of antiseptic tearing through the halls. No, the smell here is much worse.

There is white noise everywhere, but Clarke has learnt to drown that out. She’s convinced herself that she can do that, even if zombie groans will never be normal. In this dream, she has been stripped naked and she hasn’t even got her bow with her because she doesn’t know if she’d be able to use it even if she did.

And Clarke is left running, sprinting through never ending corridors in search of a way back out. And, because she is feeble, and spineless, she dies at every corner. She gets eaten over and over, and death doesn’t end the nightmare like it does for normal people because Clarke has already been there in real life and she knows that it doesn’t just end there.

There is so much worse to come after it.

Hands land on to her arms and at first, Clarke manages to weave it into the dream in the same way she used to do with her alarm clock in order to buy herself some more time in bed. Then the zombies that have latched on to her start spitting words, mouths spilling blood as though they’re drowning in it, that don’t belong here.

Things like her name, which they shouldn’t know. Things like ‘please’ which a zombie would have no use for. Things like ‘wake up’.

Raven is standing over her, one hand tight to the metal railing over Clarke’s head, and the other one on the opposite shoulder.

She opens her mouth to say something, looking pretty disturbed over what she must be saying.

“I’m fine,” Clarke tells her, voice hoarse so she must have been talking in her sleep. She doesn’t even bother trying to smile; there’s no point in it.

“You’re not fine,” Raven snaps. “You haven’t been for days.”

And it’s the truth. They all know that she’s been spiraling downward, the only source of comfort being when she gets so exhausted in the gym that her brain can’t process anything about her situation anymore.

Clarke’s shoulder feels like it might break under Raven’s hold.

“I’m going to go find something to do,”

“Clarke, you aren’t alone,”

No, she might not be alone. But she’s a liability right now.

“I’ll see you later,” she waves a hand once she’s stood up to her feet, reaching for the black pumps that she uses to train in. She’s still in cargo pants and the same olive tank top, not something she can work out in, but it’ll be good enough, she supposes.

“Clarke,”

She doesn’t answer Raven, can’t stand the pity in her voice.

Clarke doesn’t even notice that she’s slung something over her shoulder until she’s at the other end of the corridor of rooms. It just felt so natural to pick it up, to have it by her side as she left. Her bow doesn’t _feel_ like she hasn’t held it in four months. It feels like she never put it down.

Knowing that she has got to face the fear of not being good enough anymore, knowing that now is the time to do just that, Clarke storms over to room number one. She marches towards it and trips over her own feet on the way, walking too quickly that she’s almost breaking out into a run because if she hesitates, even for a moment, she’ll cop out again.

If this is what she needs to stop feeling so complacent, then she’s going to shoot and be done with it.

She knocks, once and then twice more. It’s not the typical kind of knock, more of a heckle to the door in the way that she has no regard for the fragile hinges. It doesn’t matter; there’s got to be a timer on this surge of determination. Surely?

Roan is shirtless when he opens the door, smug and calm even before he sees who’s come to see him, hanging through the doorway with his arms bracing either side of it so that he can lean forward.

“Angel, what a nice surprise,” he grins slyly, casting his eyes up and down Clarke’s body before they latch on to the weapon with its string crossing her body.

“You should put a shirt on,”

She rolls her eyes as she shoves past him and ignores the muscles all over his torso that he is not so subtly flexing.

“Maybe you should take yours off,” he hums back and doesn’t move from where he’s stood, just turns to face her and slumps against the wall lazily, crossing his arms as he watches her.

Clarke is stood in the center of the room, one hand hooked on the bow string by her hip.

His is a lot bigger than hers and Raven’s, and he doesn’t even share. He’s also got his own bathroom; she notices when she flickers her gaze around quickly. Prat.

“You wish,” she says without any spite. “I need something,”

She glances back over to Roan and takes in his full attire: gym shorts with stark white socks and some actual branded sneakers. He doesn’t look like he belongs in the apocalypse.

“This feels strangely like a dream I had the other night,” Roan muses as he leers. Something in Clarke should feel gross about his comments, but she knows he’s only joking. He’s just blunt, and upfront and she needs that at the minute. “Okay, fine,” he relents next, holding his hands above his head as though he’s surrendering, with that still self-righteous smirk on his face, lifting cheekbones that could cut through stone. “But one night, Angel, that’s all I can promise,”

He takes a couple steps towards her, only enough for him to push himself off from the wall, enough space between the two of them for Clarke to still be comfortable. She doesn’t know if she could bare to be close to someone right now: she hasn’t hugged anyone in weeks, and even Raven’s hand on her shoulder was enough to make her stomach drop.

She doesn’t want to smile, and neither does her body. When she speaks next, her lips are lilting upwards but purely of their own will because everything else in her is still riddled with sapping drive.

“I’m not going to sleep with you,”

“Who said anything about sleeping?”

“Not happening,” Clarke sighs, huffing her shoulders. “I’m here to ask you for something.”

“Anything,” he beams, taking the final step. Close enough that she can see the fine cut of his beard, see the few hairs that break from the straight edge of it. His eyes trail to her exposed collar bone and dance along the line of her bow.

“I need arrows,”

It’s enough to bring his attention back up to Clarke’s face, and it wipes the smirk from his as he tries to get a read on her, like he’s looking for a practical joke, as though she’s just wearing the weapon as a fashion accessory.

“You’re shooting?”

“Obviously not if I don’t have any ammo,”

He sighs loudly for a moment, sets her with narrow eyes and fills the room with a challenge.

“Remember who you’re speaking to here Clarke,” he says, and she supposes it should be a warning. It would be if he didn’t say it with so much respect, so much anticipation to see what she’ll respond with.

“Last time I checked, you’re the leader of the Ark. Not of me. I’ve come to ask you for a favor, as a friend, not as someone below your station,” she answers with all the confidence she can muster, the bow at her back stopping her from folding her arms over her body.

He smiles, eyes glinting.

“And why do you expect me to help you in the middle of the night?”

“Because I don’t know who else can,”

Another few seconds that consist of just the two of them squaring up against each other, and then Roan smiles again, seemingly happy with her answer.

“Well come on then,”

He nods Clarke over as though she’s been the one holding them both up, waving a hand flippantly towards the door as he turns on his heels and strides over. She breathes a sigh of relief when he looks away, then tilts her head up to the ceiling in preparation.

She’s going to shoot. If she can’t do it then at least she’ll know. She needs to know.

Roan takes her further away than she’d have thought they’d have to go. He explains to her that no one else at the base is any good with a bow and arrow, not that they’ve tested that hypothesis out or anything, but they’ve had no reason to.

When he was told that he’d have a potential shooter in his hands, he made sure to dig out all the ammo he could find for her. He tells her that with an undying arrogance, like he’s expecting Clarke to get down on her knees and worship the ground he works on for doing so.

She thanks him, tells him he didn’t have to do that if he didn’t know whether or not she was going to wake up. But he assures her that it’s as much for his own gain as it is for hers, which Clarke knew all along.

They go down to the store rooms, passing the mess hall on the way which she didn’t make it to tonight, but she wasn’t hungry. She’s never hungry anymore.

Roan presents her with a single sheath of arrows, brown leather like her old one, like the one from home, and nothing like the one they stole from the Nebraskan base. This one doesn’t hold the matte black arrows that look threatening and dauntless, these feathers are soft and just… natural. Whatever they’re made from, they reflect light and catch it from nowhere. They are so simply beautiful, and Roan actually starts laughing when Clarke can’t quite contain how excited she is.

Giving her arrows like this, is her version of a Christmas present, even if it’s only May.

“Don’t spend them all in one place,” he snorts, slinging the sheath over his own shoulder which is probably for the best. Clarke’s got her bow in her hand and she’s not sure she’d be able to resist firing the second she gets an arrow in the other.

“It doesn’t work like that,”

 

…

 

“Where do I go?” Clarke asks when she’s done walking him back up to Ark. She had guessed that they’d part ways down in the store room but he made no move to hand the arrows over and so she had assumed she’d just follow him along. She hadn’t been expecting him to take her back to his room.

“To shoot? The gun range is on the floor above,” he points upward, types in the code to his door and then swings it open.

She’s about to ask for the arrow sheath but then he’s letting the door click shut just as quickly as he steps into it, and it closes in her face just as she’s opening her mouth.

Sighing, rolling her eyes, Clarke knocks on the door again impatiently. It’s not like he’s moved away from the door, but he sure takes his time in opening it back up.

“Come back for more?” he smirks as though he’d been expecting this the whole time.

“Um, I think you’ve forgotten something,”

The realization settles into his face comically slowly and he hastens to shove the bag slung behind his back into Clarke’s arms.

“Smooth,” Clarke hums when they’ve successfully made the trade and she turns on her heel to leave.

“You’ll need to use my passcode to get inside. One-one-zero-four-thirteen,”

She hadn’t even thought of that. Clarke nods, tries to retain the information.

A hand latches around her wrist, gentle like he doesn’t care if she shoes him away.

“So this is it. You’re back at it again?”

“Maybe,” is all Clarke can answer with. She’ll know for sure once she’s at least tried to shoot.

Even having her bow over her shoulder has made her feel more like herself than anything else did in that whole twelve days, but the skill and the technique… that might all just have to come with time.

Clarke wants his hand gone so she pulls out of his hold as quickly as she can, stumbles away in the same Bambi fashion that she’s going to have to get used to eventually.

“I’ll see you around,” she calls over her shoulder and then remembers, “Thank you Roan. I really appreciate it,”

But he’s already stepping back into his room with a wave goodbye and when the lock clicks shut, Clarke takes it as her opportunity to scamper off to the place that holds something very similar to potential inside it.

 

…

 

She gets lost on the way into the gun range, of course she does. He was right about it having restricted access, which is most definitely a good thing. Guns with people that aren’t used to handling them, with people that are incredibly emotionally vulnerable right now, are not a good combination.

Clarke supposes the only people allowed up here are the Ark. She wonders where they keep their own guns, or if they even have them. Maybe some of the team shouldn’t be walking around whilst armed right now, herself included.

Luckily, since this floor is basically the quietest, she doesn’t run into anyone up here, and she remembers Roan’s passcode for all of the doors she reaches. She thinks about it- six numbers- and they could be a date. She’ll have to ask when she gets the chance. When talking to people doesn’t feel as wrong as it does now.

Before she finds the gun range, Clarke makes sure the straps of the quiver of arrows are adjusted properly to fit to her body which takes a while, and then she takes an arrow out to hold it between her fingers.

Baby steps, after all, are what she’s been trained on. And she can still do her little, meaningless finger trick if that’s anything to go by. Muscle memory kicks in as she’s walking, and she’s got it twirling its way in between each digit as though she’s never put an arrow down.

These ones are a little lighter than what she’s used to but that doesn’t make them bad quality. If she fucks this up, she’ll have no excuses.

Another keypad when she reaches a door with the sign ‘caution: live ammunition’ on it- which looks pretty promising- and she types in Roan’s code again.

It’s just like what she’d been expecting. This place, after all, was a fully operating military base in the time before the apocalypse. They wouldn’t have needed to prepare areas like this; this would have been waiting on a silver platter for the rest of the team.

There are about a dozen booths stretching parallel to the wall, like little cubicles that have semi dividers so that, if you weren’t trying to see, you wouldn’t be able to watch a neighbor firing. If you craned your head perhaps, or tried to look, you could.

Down the other end of the room are stands, assorted. Some look like they’ve been covered in Kevlar and others are just wooden, disposable. They’ve all got covers as thin as card with black and white targets printed on to the front. Bullet holes scatter each one, ranging from dead bullseye to the corners of the squares, so they haven’t been replaced in a while.

There’s no one firing, or gearing up to fire, which is evident from the silence that fills the room. There are lockers along the wall facing the booths, like school lockers but twice the size, all with numbers on the face of them. The numbers only go up to thirteen; Clarke has a feeling that has something to do with the numbers on the doors of Ark floor.

She doesn’t touch them, doesn’t need them. She’s got everything she needs on her back.

Her feet make little clicking sounds against the floor of this room. It’s colder than she’d have expected it to be, and Clarke kind of wishes she’d remembered to bring one of the jackets she’s managed to seize.

All of this thinking… it’s only prolonging the inevitable.

Shoving everything else away, Clarke takes the last few strides over to where she’s aiming for: the last booth at the very end of the room. If someone comes in, at least they won’t see her from the entrance. Not that anyone will come in, there’s only thirteen of them and it’s almost midnight.

She takes her bow from off of her shoulder and brings it around to hold it properly in her hands. The way it glides against her scarred palm isn’t painful, isn’t completely uncomfortable, it’s just a new feeling. The skin there is bumpy and jolted in the way it has healed: almost like they’ve had to laminate another layer of it roughly over the cut. Clarke isn’t complaining- she’s lucky to even have a hand at the rate she was going.

This bow, her bow from the days before, still feels right. It would, it was a gift from her father after all. It’s still got the etching in the top of the metal body that they’d figured out how to do together. Little silhouettes of stars because she’d been young and hadn’t understood that etching lasts forever.

Not that she’d take them away now. Still, nothing like that should be permanent.

She brings the arrow in between her fingertips to sit into the arrow rest as slowly as she can, ignoring the way her hands are shaking slightly. It only just finds its place when she needs another minute, both objects collapsing down on to the counter in front of her along with both palms that come to lean heavily on to it.

She needs to grow up, to move on, to take back what was so simply stricken from her, it’s just… scary.

She remembers what she’d told that kid in the mess hall. She wants someone who can be brave; if that is what she’s asking for then she has to be that too, otherwise it just isn’t fair.

 _Come on Clarke,_ her own personal Jiminy Cricket says somewhere in the back of her mind. His voice ragged and deep just like it always was. God, she misses that voice.

Her arms are bent as though she’s doing some sort of push up, but after a few deep breaths, a few blinks that take longer than they normally would, Clarke pushes herself up and takes the bow back into her hand.

With as steady a grip as she can manage, she slides the feathered arrow into its place and lets two fingers curl around the bow string when she starts to pull it back.

Okay, whoever restrung this- Murphy said ‘we’ but knowing him, he definitely had no input into it- made the string way too loose. There is nowhere near as much tension as there should be: a sufficient amount for someone with as much experience as she has, but Clarke will need to redo it whenever she gets the chance.

She brings the string back as far as it will go, a stupid amount considering where the tension should become the limit, but eventually it’s enough strain. She breathes in coolly, forms an O with her mouth as she breathes back out.

The targets are quite far away, further than what would be normal for a civilian gun range, but she doesn’t let herself think about how small they look from here.

She just releases the arrow and watches as it sails in slow motion towards the stand. It wobbles a bit as it travels, diverges with a mind of its own, and then it sticks into the wood covered behind a target and she has to blink a few more times to make sure what she’s seeing is what she’s actually seeing.

It isn’t dead center. Not bullseye, but surely verging on the edge of that tiny dot. It’s enough to draw a small gasping laugh from her lips, an audible and relieved cry. So she hasn’t lost that. She hasn’t lost that part of her.

She can still shoot. She can still defend herself with this, even if her arms are like twigs and her stomach is practically snappable. She’s still got this.

She laughs again, just once and just sharp, not sounding overly happy because that isn’t what this is. She’s just so fucking relieved that she isn’t completely useless.

“Good work,”

Clarke snaps her head over to the doorway faster than the arrow that was just soaring through the air. There’s a man, unrecognizable in the meek lights of this room, leant back against the wall with his arms folded, head lolling back, and one foot drawn up flat against it.

His face would be pretty, objectively speaking, if it weren’t for his oddly shaped nose and the way his lips curl up naturally into a smirk, as though he’s only ever known what it is to be better than other people.

“Seriously, they said you were good…”

His voice is gross. Smarmy and pretentious and she doesn’t want to be the one to listen to whatever he’s saying.

“I thought I’d be alone,” she says bluntly and turns back to the target, expecting whoever this is to just leave.

He doesn’t. He pushes himself off the wall, nowhere near as cool or as natural as Roan did it just an hour ago and starts to walk towards her.

“I haven’t seen you around,” the stranger leers as he gets closer. He glides past Clarke, shoulder brushing the whole way across her back, and he settles on to the wall next to her. There’s no space between her and it for him to squeeze through, but he leans as close as he can get to her, his whole right side pressed flat against the wall, his head behind and above her shoulder. “Don’t you eat?”

“If I wanted to be around people, I’d be in a place with people,”

Clarke knows she’s being a little too harsh, but all of the reprieve and ease in her body has been sapped away and this guy is already giving her the creeps.

“But I’m not just people,” he says as though it’s obvious, as though he’s expecting her to have any kind of reaction to him being ‘not just people’.

“Look like people to me,”

She hasn’t bothered to look at him again, she focuses instead on reloading her bow and it happens as naturally as it ever did this time. Like her body knows that danger is nearby before her mind does.

“Take another look. You might like what you see,”

Clarke ignores that.

The stranger behind her moves in even closer, would be sneering if he wasn’t radiating this… greed. His head comes level to her ear, eyes watching the train of her arrow as she takes aim.

Touching anyone at all has been almost painful lately. Being this close to someone who she instantly doesn’t like, is almost impossible to stand. Her feet stick heavily to the ground. It’s good that her body is completely orthogonal to the counter because she can pretend he’s not even here when she can’t see him.

If it weren’t for his wheezing breaths tumbling toward her ear, he would be invisible.

She fires again, hits just off dead center again.

“You’re the comatose,”

Clarke stays silent and holds her breath.

“They said you were worth all that life support,” he says, unconvinced but like he’s making an effort to sound impressed. “Didn’t realize you’d be so…”

He hesitates, clearly sensing how frozen she’s become. Clarke focuses only on the tiny target at the other end of the room.

“Cage Wallace,”

He clears his throat like that is Clarke’s cue to turn around and introduce herself.

She takes a minute to weigh the options before she slams her bow down on to the counter, remembering to keep her hand on top of it just in case she needs to use it sometime soon. She spins around, doesn’t like how close together this brings her chest to his or how near she is to the towering wall, but makes sure to look him in the eye when she speaks.

“You’ve made things difficult,”

He grins but there’s no genuine happiness on his face. It’s… sardonic in a word.

“So have you. Makes us quite the pair, doesn’t it?”

He leans in closer, so close that she can taste his breath. It’s rancid and encompasses her, raises goose bumps for all the wrong reasons.

“No. It doesn’t. I’m trying to train, so I’d really appreciate being left alone,”

“That’s cool,” he keeps grinning, and for a moment she thinks he might go. “I’ll behave.”

When Cage winks at her, Clarke’s stomach churns.

Even closer, arm shifting so that it grazes against hers, almost blocking them from everywhere else. She just wants out.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do but-”

“Oh, no Clarke, we’re just getting to know each other. We’re going to be friends, you and I,” he says it like there’s some inside joke between them that she should be laughing at.

She never told him her name.

His hand starts to turn, slowly, like if he does it subtly enough she might not even notice it. His palm rests flat against the back of hers and his fingers latch themselves around her closed fist.

Even if he is the one against the wall, it’s Clarke who feels trapped.

“I’m not interested,”

“No, no, no,” he coos, other hand shifting to get even closer into her space now that he’s got her hand enclosed in his.

Cage steps forward and Clarke doesn’t know what to do with herself so she just takes any step she can think of. Another and another and another and then somehow they’ve switched places, so that her back is flush against the wall and she’s lost all grip on her bow.

He crowds over her, brown hair sweeping into his face as though he’s styled it like that.

“See, it doesn’t work that way with me. I’m used to getting what I want. I’ve met your mother Clarke, I imagine you like getting what you want too,”

“I want you to leave,” she snarls, baring her teeth even as they grit close together.

“You don’t understand. I’m going to stay. But you want to be treated well and I’m going to treat you just like a prin-”

“She told you to leave.”

Seismic. He’ll always be seismic. He always has been. That’s just his voice to a tee and it’ll never be anything less than that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Please don't leave me lonely,'  
> \- Shaky in the Knees, Grizfolk
> 
> Okay, okay, the wait is kind of over. Bellamy's coming back.


	26. The stars, mean nothing without you

Clarke can’t see past the man towering over her, leering and lingering over her, but she knows who is standing in the doorway. He still sounds just as angry as he did in the mess hall. Maybe he’s just forever angry now.

Cage doesn’t seem that mad about being interrupted, he just heaves a sigh and rolls his eyes, still grinning maliciously as he tosses his head over his shoulder, like he’s addicted to the game he’s invented.

“Beat it,” he calls, sounding uninterested before he turns back to Clarke, his forearm coming to rest over her head so he can lean in closer.

“Get away,” Clarke tries again, knowing Bellamy is only feet away and even if they haven’t spoken to each other in so long, just being around him makes her feel that tiny bit more powerful. “Get off,”

She kicks at his shin, hard enough to make him grunt, but he doesn’t move.

In the next second, Cage is being shoved away from her with enough force to push him down to the floor. A hand, those huge hands, lands dangerously heavy on to his shoulder and it brings him toward the lockers.

Bellamy slams him against them, the sound ringing through the room, ricocheting and making it feel as though ten more people are being thrown against ten more lockers.

Unlike how he clung to Murphy’s sweater, vice like grip in the mess hall, Bellamy settles for pushing this guy into the wall. He does it so hard that the resultant momentum causes him to fly back but he steadies himself just as quickly as he stumbles.

“She asked you to leave,” he says; a command.

Cage braces himself on his knees, pants slightly because the knock must have winded him properly. Once he’s recovered, he stands fully and ascends toward Bellamy.

“Who even are you?” Cage bites, not touching him.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re out of here,”

When Cage makes no move to leave again, Bellamy lunges for his arm and pushes him toward the door, making him trip over his own feet as he tries to stay upright, wedging himself between Clarke and the stumbling man.

He doesn’t head toward the door; he stands up again and faces the two of them.

“You don’t tell me what to do. When my father hears about this-”

“Dude you’re not getting it,” Bellamy stalks up to him again, making Cage trip backwards and he may have been towering over Clarke, but he is absolutely nothing in comparison to Bellamy and all of his power. “I’m telling you to leave her alone, and you are going to listen to me,”

“And what’s it to you, huh? Who are you to choose who she does and doesn’t get to know?”

Clarke pushes herself off the wall as Bellamy pushes Cage to the door, as though drawn by magnets because once she’s fallen into Bellamy’s field, it’s like she can’t lose hold of it again. She just needs to be close to him for as long as she can.

“I’m no one,” Bellamy thunders lowly, hand prodding at Cage’s chest and that’s all it takes to shove him back against it. And even though Bellamy is chest to chest with the other man, threatening enough as it is, he shoves Cage again so that the back of his head slams against the door. “And _she_ was the one who decided she doesn’t want you. I’m just the guy making sure that you respect that. Now. Get. Out,”

He snarls each word of the last sentence, breathes heavily between each one and Clarke would be scared of him if she didn’t know him so well.

In one moment he’s dominating the room completely, hovering over Cage with so much aggression, but in the next he’s alone, and Cage is gone, and Bellamy has slumped forward with his forearm pushed to the door, his head in the crook of his elbow like that night he came out of the gym.

He’s still breathing heavily, raggedly, pressing so hard into the door like he’s trying to control himself, contain himself from doing Something.

Clarke feels the oxygen leave her lungs so suddenly that she forgets how to breathe. It’s like her body’s automatic response is just to help him. If he can’t catch his own breath then she’ll catch his for him, she’ll give him hers.

They are alone, in a room with a closed door for the first time. He’s in the way of the exit but she wouldn’t want to leave anyway. The difference between being in here with Bellamy, and being in here with Cage, is she isn’t trapped here. Even if she doesn’t want to be around him, she knows he’d never hurt her, not like that at least.

The bruising on his face has faded, all that’s left are the purple marks under his eyes. She can’t tell if he’s just tired or if those are marks what Wells gave him.

There are so many questions that need to be asked. So many answers that need to be filled into the gaps. Clarke has no idea where to start but she’s got to start somewhere before he just… walks out again.

So many questions on the tip of her tongue and yet the one it seems to choose is pathetic and idiotic, and even if it does make him smile, which she’s pretty sure it doesn’t, Clarke wouldn’t be able to see it because he’s hiding his face.

“Dude?”

Her voice is hoarse but that’s not because of Cage. The room is static. If she moves then she’ll get shocked.

He doesn’t say anything and for the longest time, Clarke doesn’t think he will at all. She hopes he’s smiling at her question, really does even if it’s selfish. There are so many problems between them; making stupid jokes is going to fix absolutely nothing.

She has a feeling though, that even if he can’t stand to be around her as much as he’s letting on, he still might be smiling into the corner of his arm.

Moments later, he’s rolling the top of his head around against the door and he’s looking at Clarke for the first time in so long. He doesn’t meet her eyes at all. He just watches how her feet are lifted like they’re about to take off, like they’re scared to touch the floor.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Clarke says when he makes no move to answer her. The air is so thick that it might start to crackle if she speaks too loudly. She’ll have to be careful with whatever she lets out.

There are miles and miles between them.

“I know,”

His voice is strained, like it’s hurting him to speak.

At opposite ends of the room, far enough away from each other that he wouldn’t hear her if she were to whisper, Clarke holds herself tall.

“Did you follow me?”

He snorts briefly, just for a second, and then his fist raises up and he bites down on to it. He takes some time before he tears it away from his mouth, and then he’s throwing his pointed hand over to one of the booths near his end.

“I came to shoot,”

Clarke blanks. Of course he did. How foolish of her to think that he might actually want to spend some time in the same place she is.

“Oh. Right,” she mumbles, head dropping low to hide her flushing cheeks. She reaches for her bow and then turns away from him to the counter flap on the row of firing stations. “I can go.”

Clarke lifts it up, ducks between it and the wall, then speed-walks over to her target to wrench her arrows out of it. She stops when she gets to it though, wants to take a minute to remember exactly where they landed so that she knows how much she needs to improve by.

He’s moved across the room in the time it takes her to drift along the wall, like they are a video game and every step she takes, he takes one behind her. Maybe he’s being drawn by the same magnetism she is.

“You’re okay,” he says, and it makes Clarke turn her head to him, both hands bracing him on the counter of the booth she’d just been occupying. She knows he’s saying that she can stay, but it doesn’t sound like that. It sounds like more, because it always does with him.

Bellamy isn’t looking at her, he’s watching the target next to her head.

“First time?”

He points weakly to the arrows and Clarke suddenly feels embarrassed about where they landed. They aren’t on the center, they’ve just missed, but they may as well be off the board with how disappointed she’s become. If she could have just had some more time to practice, maybe he’d have seen her shoot when she was actually good again.

“I should be better,” she tells herself, tugging harshly at each arrow and shoving them into the pack behind her back. Clarke storms back over to the counter flap and for some reason, she can’t quite get past it, she can’t quite muster the strength to lift it. Instead she just mirrors his stance, palms flat on top of it, and avoids looking at him. “My arm’s too low and I keep bending my knees so I’m too shaky and if I just focused then maybe I could-”

“Your string is too loose,”

She can’t remember him actually looking at her but he’s right. It’s clearly hanging awkwardly on her back, lower than what would be comfortable.

“I know,”

She doesn’t want to make excuses for herself. It doesn’t sound like one when he says it, but it feels like one when she admits it.

“Did he hurt you?”

They’re still not looking at each other but Bellamy hasn’t left yet so Clarke takes the small step to the right that she needs to take in order to be opposite him. Either sides of the counter, tucked away in the booth.

He doesn’t lean back, so Clarke doesn’t lean forward.

“I don’t know what hurt is anymore,” she says when Bellamy still doesn’t meet her eyes, choosing instead to watch how his fingers spread on the table surface. “I hurt people. I get hurt. What does that make it?”

“Did, did he touch you?”

At least when he speaks this time, Bellamy’s voice is a little more raw. A little more choked. He clears his throat afterwards, closes his eyes.

Maybe Clarke should just answer his questions with the answers he’s looking for.

“My hand,”

He thinks, chews his jaw throughout the silence like he’s trying to bite it away.

“Let me see,” he whispers, and the way she hears it, it sounds like he’s caving to something.

She hasn’t heard him whisper yet. It’s still as bone shattering as it used to be. It still compels her like it used to do. Clarke gives him the hand, still fisted, that Cage took a hold of like it was his. Like he owned it.

Bellamy hesitates when she holds it out, like he doesn’t know what he’s asked her for. He bites his lip, just the half of it, and holds his breath when he wraps his fingers around her closed palm. Clarke mirrors him, his skin so hot that she’ll probably burst into flames if she dares to breathe out right now.

His touch is still featherlight. For someone who is so adamant that he doesn’t care anymore, he still holds her like she deserves to be cared about.

He pulls Clarke’s hand over to his side of the counter and she doesn’t have to stumble forward to reach him, but she does anyway and catches herself on the edge of it, watching him. Bellamy brings his other hand up, twists hers in the two of them, and then spreads her fingers out so that he can see her palm.

She hadn’t even considered the scar covering eighty percent of it, that ugly skin. She doesn’t want him to see it. First her utter lack of power against Cage, then her failure to reach the level of shooting she used to be at, and now this. What must she look like to him?

He runs his fingers lightly along it, along the line that was sliced open last winter, and he has his head bowed so she can’t see his face. He must look disgusted.

“He did hurt you,” he whispers again.

Clarke looks down to see what he’s seeing. There are three red crescent shaped marks on the bottom of her hand, someone’s nails digging out the skin of her palm but they’re too near her wrist to be hers and her nails are too blunt to have done damage like that.

“I didn’t- it’s- it’s nothing,”

She hadn’t even noticed them. There’s that numbing again.

“It’s not nothing,”

“And you aren’t no one,”

He’d just said that to Cage.

He’s drawn back to the healed cut on her palm and he’s taken to tracing his thumb over it, like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Over and over and over again and he still won’t look at her.

“Bellamy?” she sounds about eight.

“Clarke?” he doesn’t sound much better, but he doesn’t sound angry now. He sounds like Bellamy.

“I can’t do this,”

Clarke tears herself away from where he’s holding her, and she trips on her way through the counter flap but that doesn’t stop her from marching all the way over to the door. She can’t breathe, she can’t think clearly, she can’t be in the same room as him right now.

She might not know what hurt is anymore, but he left her, and he beat Murphy up right in front of her face. He’s ignored her over and over and even if he looks just like the Bellamy she knew, even if he is talking to her like the Bellamy she knew, even if he holds her like he used to…

He’s not the same person and it _hurts_ to be around him now.

“Clarke,” he calls when her hand comes to rest on the handle of the door. She pauses and grips it a little too tightly before she tosses her head over her shoulder, breathless.

He’s still in the same spot, not having made any move to get closer to her, clearly sensing her need for space. But it wasn’t his touch that made her feel sick to her stomach, like when the others had tried.

He’s looking at the space above her head.

“I don’t need protecting, Bellamy. Stop using me as an excuse to beat people up,”

The door swings open and slams closed behind her, leaving Bellamy inside and she doesn’t know what he’s doing but she doesn’t care either. He made it so that she isn’t his problem anymore. That means he doesn’t get to be hers.

He walked out.

It must be reaching the early hours of the morning by now but there’s no way Clarke can stomach going back to that room, the one with her bed in it, the one with her bunked cage of nightmares. She can’t go back there right now, and she needs to keep shooting but Bellamy is in the range and she just can’t…

She’s not going to go down the stairs right now, so she just carries herself over to the staircase and keeps moving up. She doesn’t stop at the next floor, or the next floor, or the next and eventually the stairs narrow, and she draws up to what looks like a fire escape.

The door to it is sticky, with a width-long metal push handle but she opens it anyway because she wants to know what’s behind the door with no passcode.

Everything is dark on the other side of it, completely pitch black and she wonders how a room could ever be dark like this with the lights of the corridor streaming through to it. Then Clarke realizes it’s not a room: it’s the outside.

This is the roof, it must be. She takes a step forward, loading her bow on pure instinct because it’s not like there’s going to be anything dangerous out here, but old habits die hard and she can’t remember a time she felt truly safe outside.

A breeze hits her face instantly and sweeps her hair all around it. She wishes she’d had the sense to put it up beforehand, but there’s too much curiosity brewing within her to do anything about it now.

It’s empty. Completely empty and the only thing that would protect someone from falling off the top of the roof is a foot-high ledge. Nothing more. It pulls Clarke towards it incessantly, and within the next few seconds, she finds herself stood on top of it, looking out into a blank and cloudy sky, refusing to glance down to the acres below it.

The wind picks up, no longer blocked by anything at all. The building must be ten stories high- she hasn’t managed to count all of the floors yet- if she were to fall then the drop probably wouldn’t even take too long. There wouldn’t be any pain either, maybe. It would just be… death.

It doesn’t scare her. Clarke has seen death, up close. She doesn’t step down from the ledge even when the wind lifts her hair into her eyes. Instead, she makes herself at home, bends her knees so that she’s crouching low, bow still at an angle and loaded because it’s just natural.

She kicks out, lands heavily to sit down, and crosses her legs over the side of the building, swinging against the wall.

The sky, the empty and meaningless sky, turns out to be boring within minutes of waiting for the heavens to open up, and so her eyes drop down. Murphy was right about the big ‘fuck off’ wall around this place. It must be taller than at least half the building and there only seems to be one gate in the parts that she can see: tiny in comparison to the surrounding wall.

There’s no chance of climbing over that thing, none at all. It should make her feel safe, it should make her feel secure, but Clarke just feels trapped.

The wind is too loud for any other noise from the outside to reach her ears, and so if there are walkers out there then she wouldn’t know. Right now she doesn’t care.

This is instantly her favorite place in the whole of the building, at least out here she can remember what it was like to feel alive. Because she doesn’t feel alive, not here. Not anymore.

Clarke raises the angle of her arms slightly, lets one elbow pull back as far as it will go, and then she’s fired the arrow in her bow out into the night sky. She can follow it as it reaches its peak in the curve, out further than it should normally but she can blame that on the longer string, and then it gets lost. Feathers soaring and unable to reflect light because there is none of it out here.

When the tension leaves the bowstring, it leaves every other part of her too. It doesn’t matter where the arrow ended up, it really doesn’t.

What matters is the adrenaline rushing through the places that she’d forgotten how to feel: her fingertips, her ankles, the back of her jaw. She knows what she’s got to do.

If she wants those dreams to stop, then she’s going to have to face whatever fear is living inside her head. She’s got to get out there and she’s got to fight. Then when she has to face him, it won’t be so daunting, because she’ll have courage. And it will be courage that he won’t have anymore.

It will be courage that Bellamy Blake let go of when he ran away from her.

 

…

 

Roan swings his door open, shirtless once more but looking a lot more sleepy now. He’s rubbing at his eyes, yawning and the lights to his room are all off when Clarke peers inside.

“Okay, tell me I’m dreaming now,” he says, smirking because that thing never leaves his damn face. Luckily, Roan’s flirting is all harmless. She doesn’t feel threatened by it like she did with Cage’s, she doesn’t feel like there’s going to be more. It’s friendly more than anything else; warm.

“I’m ready,”

His smile drifts away from his face as soon as the words sink in. He takes Clarke in, wraps his piercing icy gaze around the bow hanging loose around her shoulders, takes in the hard set of her shoulders, the wild look in her eyes from the force of the wind.

“If you’ll have me, I’m ready,”

She must look positively mad, but she’s joining the Ark and there is no doubt in her mind about it. She just needs to get out of here.

“You’re sure? Absolutely, one hundred percent sure?” he asks, but the glint in his eyes is unmoving and the smirk is seeping back in now that the surprise is gone.

“I’m sure,” Clarke nods, still slightly breathless.

Roan starts to lean towards her, both hands gripping on to either side of the doorway and he looks as though he’s about to hug her until he thinks better of it. He must read the hostility on her face immediately because instead, he just grins, nods once, and then wipes it all away.

“Team meeting is tomorrow night. Tell Raven, show up, it’ll be good for you to meet everyone,”

A wave of panic ripples down her spine at the thought of actually talking to the people who sit on the other end of Ark’s table. They are all muscle, all lean and fit and impressive when they’re made of one big cluster, because they have to be if they’re going out into the new world every week. Clarke is a child in comparison. She shoves that panic away.

“I’ll be there,” she nods again, and he braces her with one more look before the door closes.

A look that says, ‘I knew you’d get there’. A look that says, ‘If you need more time, take it’.

She’s glad Roan is the leader of the Ark. She’s glad it’s someone that she can trust.

 

…

 

Raven is asleep when Clarke sneaks into her room, her hand hanging down between the beds like she’s reaching for Clarke’s, like she’s trying to shield it.

Clarke can tell her in the morning. She doesn’t need to wake up for any of this. She’s still debating bringing up what happened between her and Cage, but if she does that then she’ll have to bring up what happened between her and Bellamy, and that isn’t going to be of use to anyone.

Clarke doesn’t really want to talk about either of them, and so she won’t.

She falls asleep, still fully dressed in what she wore with Octavia, and she doesn’t dream of walkers, or lost love tonight. She dreams of falling. She dreams of air tumbling through her hair, or wind attempting to lift her clothes, to catch on to any sort of drag. She dreams of hard and fast collisions with concrete slabs, which are painless in comparison to the many deaths she’s already dreamt up.

It’s not a nightmare. In fact, it’s the most peaceful dream she’s had since arriving to Vancouver.

 

…

 

Sharing a room with Raven, Clarke noticed on the morning she moved in here, feels oddly high school. In moments like this one, where Raven jumps down off of her bed, ignoring the ladder at the other end, and stalks heavily toward the light switch, Clarke is brought back to her days in college.

“You coming down for breakfast today?” she asks hopefully as she moves toward her own set of drawers. She’s noticed how Clarke isn’t eating as much as she should be and every time, she makes sure to let Clarke know that she isn’t buying any of the excuses.

“Sure,” Clarke says, looking to get on to Raven’s good side before she lets her know the news.

They get dressed in the same room, stepping around each other. Having lived with each other out in the wild, boundaries sort of became non-existent. They’ve been naked in front of each other countless times; Raven’s probably the only person that she doesn’t feel so self-conscious around.

“When did you get back last night? I didn’t hear you come in,” Raven wonders, tossing a concerned look over her shoulder.

That isn’t what she was trying to say. She means ‘I didn’t hear you shouting in your sleep. I didn’t hear you wake up, breathless and panting. I didn’t hear your nightmares,’

“Not too late. I just needed some air,”

“Did something happen yesterday?”

Clarke settles for a half truth as she ties the laces of her shoes and as Raven throws a jacket over her shoulders, clearly undisturbed by the incoming summer heat.

“Octavia dropped by,”

She says it casually, not expecting too large a reaction, but she forgets that it’s been _four months_ since Raven spoke to her. It wasn’t just the blip that Clarke flew through.

Raven’s head snaps over, face blank to shut out everything she’s clearly been trying to hold back about the Blakes.

“She have anything to say?” she asks, sounding like she couldn’t care less.

Clarke drifts over to the door, holds it open for the both of them on the way out.

“She’s Octavia. She came to bury the hatchet,”

Clarke can’t really imagine her doing anything else. In the time they knew each other, everything was always as simple as that between them.

Raven snorts, void of emotion.

“I take it she got bored of radio silence?”

Clarke always forgets that it was Raven and Octavia who knew each other in the time before, who were the whole reason the two pairs even joined in the first place. It does seem strange that neither of them have approached each other. She’d have thought if any relationship were to make it out of this still standing, it would have been them two.

“She wanted to explain why she did what she did,”

She doesn’t mention Bellamy, nor does she mention their mother. It’s not her story to tell.

“How nice of her. Well, you should count yourself lucky: that’s more than me and Murphy have gotten in months,”

They knock on Wells and Murphy’s door on the way past it and lean on either side of the corridor to wait for them.

Looking at it from a distance, she would guess that Octavia hurt Raven a lot more than she hurt either Murphy or Clarke. Sure, she was the one who was abandoned while she was dying, but they were close for years. Clarke wasn’t the one who deserved the apology from the younger sibling.

“She’ll come back to you,” she offers, suddenly feeling guilty about it before she realizes it wasn’t her doing. “She might be afraid of what you’re going to say,”

And maybe, Octavia is angry at you too, she wants to say.

“She’s meant to be brave,” is all Raven says back, watching the floor so intently she might be able to burn holes through it.

Clarke walks over, shoves away the tension that builds in her arm at the thought of what she’s about to do, and reaches a hand to land on Raven’s shoulder, squeezes it softly to let her know that she understands what Raven is going through too.

Of course she does.

A flickering glance of appreciation is all Raven has time to give back. It’s enough for them to relax against each other before Wells and Murphy are barreling out of their room, talking about something avidly, hands gesturing in all directions.

They walk down to the mess hall together. Clarke checks her watch and sees the time is half past eight. There’s no way that the mess hall is going to be quiet. She’s going to get stared at probably more than she can handle. She usually never goes this late.

They open the huge double doors, get the same set of curious looks that they normally do, and then walk inside, attempting to ignore everything on the outside of their group.

They head past the Ark table and Clarke barely spares a glance to it. She feels people watching her from there too, and she wonders if Roan has told anyone about her officially becoming the newest member yet.

“Why is _he_ sat here?” Murphy groans quietly on the way around the room.

Clarke looks over to see who he’s talking about and her breath catches when she sees who is sat next to Roan, talking mutedly and inexpressive. Much more passively than he was acting last night.

Cage is eating like a frat boy, mouth open and chucking the food in across the few inches between his plate and his head, like he can only be here for a few minutes. He’s got enough food on his plate to last a lifetime, she notices. A mountain of carbs that she’s pretty sure one person shouldn’t have all to themselves right now.

Roan doesn’t look too happy about being his neighbor, which she’d have expected. She’s too busy trying to remember to school her expression to notice who is stood over at the food counter.

He’s stood next to Echo, like he usually is, but there’s always a distance between them. Maybe that’s Clarke’s wishful thinking, maybe she’s just seeing something she wants to see, but there is a space between them that looks… strange. Or absolutely, perfectly normal, depending on how you look at it.

Echo is in front of him, on the right, and the four of them are next in line. It’s fine- she’ll have to get used to being around him eventually.

Wells stands closest to the pair as they get their food, sliding his plate along the service counter as the woman behind the counter- Clarke remembers that she’s called Monroe, but doesn’t address her by her name because they don’t know each other- serves up something that looks a lot like gruel. It’s overly grainy oatmeal and it’s the type of food that Clarke would refuse to eat as a kid.

She says thank you as warmly as she can, because it’s not Monroe’s fault that the food here is disgusting.

Wells ignores Bellamy as they get their food and Echo makes no move to acknowledge any of them. Clarke isn’t sure if she imagines the way Bellamy lingers at the last tray of food, but he finishes getting his serving after Wells does which doesn’t quite add up.

He doesn’t look at Clarke, doesn’t look at anyone. His hair is so long now that it tumbles into his eyes, curls bunching up around his face. He’s using it to hide away.

She tears away from the counter before he can, almost jogging over to join Wells as he walks away. She doesn’t have to look back to know that Bellamy and Echo are a little bit behind the two of them.

She takes her usual seat, one down from the head of the table because she can actually use a bench now, and Wells sits next to her. He doesn’t notice when she makes sure to duck her head a lot more than she normally does, after realizing that she’s within Cage’s clear line of sight, him on her two o’clock.

Expecting Bellamy to go to the other end of this table, as he so usually does whenever they end up eating at the same time, Clarke is surprised when he drops down technically on the other side of Wells.

There’s a huge gap between them, big enough for three or four people, but it lands him directly opposite Roan and sort of in between Cage and Clarke, and she knows that sitting there was intentional.

Still with her head bent strangely over her plate, Clarke tries to ignore the buzz in her stomach at sharing something with him that no one else knows. Everyone else can think that this was just coincidence, that this was just unfortunate placement, but Clarke and Bellamy both know that he sat there with a purpose.

And if that purpose was to look out for her then she can be both warmed and annoyed by that.

Raven and Murphy take their seats opposite her, with Murphy a little way down from Roan. It’s the wrong time to mention her joining the Ark. For some reason, maybe she doesn’t know it yet, but Clarke can’t do it here while she’s battling with just the mere presence of the man who hung over her like a bad smell last night.

Murphy exchanges a look with her, nodding subtly over at Bellamy while keeping his eyes on Clarke to ask if she’s alright with this. But Bellamy isn’t the problem right now, and it’s difficult to convey that without him knowing about what happened.

She knows the exact moment Cage spots her, feels his gaze land on her, predatory and filled with the same greed he’d been absorbed in last night. She risks a flickering glance up and it’s a mistake because he breaks out into a grin when they make eye contact. Yeah, predatory.

And if that doesn’t make her stomach churn, what he does next makes her want to throw up. He catches something, he sees something that she doesn’t want anyone to know about. He sees the distance between her and Bellamy; switches between the two of them with a knowing snarl on his face and then raises an eyebrow her way as if to say, ‘I see through your united front.’

Even with Wells’ body in the way, Clarke feels the bench move when Bellamy shifts in his seat, spreads out and draws Cage’s scrutiny away from her with that movement.

It’s all unspoken. It’s one big challenge between the three of them.

“Eat something, Clarke,” Wells mumbles, only now looking up from his food to look around the rest of the table.

Cage says something lowly into Roan’s ear, she notices, and Roan makes the smallest of expressions in response: disgust riddling only the corners of his face. He looks briefly over to Clarke, so briefly that she would have missed it if she weren’t trying to listen to the conversation. He looks concerned for her.

“I’ve lost my appetite,”

“Eat something,” he says, no nonsense.

“Here,” Murphy grins, grabbing a butter bean from his tray and swinging it over his shoulder to line it up, getting ready to launch it into Clarke’s mouth.

She can’t help but smile at that. It’s their game, always has been. She opens her mouth to catch it, has to lean a little further to the left than she would have liked, but does so in order to keep it on her tongue.

Maybe it’s because she wants to show Cage that she isn’t affected by his leering, Clarke decides to distract herself with Murphy’s invitation: his growing, almost proud, smile telling her that he’ll keep playing if it means she’ll eat something.

She throws a bean off of her own tray into his mouth and she’s an archer, so of course her aim isn’t going to be bad.

They volley for a while, taking in turns, and she forgets just for a second that Cage is even here. They do it subtly enough so as not to attract any unnecessary attention- that’s the last thing they need.

When it’s her fifth turn to throw, Clarke challenges him and throws it a bit more to his right than he was expecting. Murphy’s natural reaction, his reflex, makes him throw his head quickly towards it but he ends up headbutting Raven in the process, so hard that she curses loudly enough to alert the whole table.

“Fuck!” she hisses, letting her fork drop to the table so that she can cradle her temple, her elbow pinned against the surface.

Murphy winks quietly to Clarke before he bites down on the bean obnoxiously and turns to give Raven a half-assed apology.

The bark of laughter that erupts from Clarke’s throat is a surprise to herself more than anyone, but when she catches the glares of a couple mothers a few tables down, looking disapprovingly toward Raven’s poor choice of language, she can’t help but laugh.

Wells exhales loudly through his nose, his form of a lazy chuckle, and they grin at each other for a second.

There’s a clatter a little further down the table, louder than how Raven had dropped her cutlery carelessly. Not a clatter, because a clatter sounds like an accident. This rattles the stretch of the table. It comes from Wells’ right and Bellamy has clearly done the same thing, but he’s thrown his fork down to the table, still under his palm, as though he’s trying to restrain himself.

Clarke doesn’t care if she is being obvious; she cranes forward to look for him, the giggling evaporating into thin air just as quickly as it arrived. He’s got his other hand holding his head up, shading his forehead like he’s trying to stop the light from reaching his eyes, like he’s trying to stop everyone from seeing his expression.

“Bellamy,” Clarke hears Echo whisper, sounding concerned but impatient.

She says his name like she owns it. It churns Clarke’s stomach again.

His fingers fold under themselves against the table, trying to claw their way through it, his fork still placed somewhere in that grip.

“What’s wrong Blake?” Cage grins loudly, taking pleasure from seeing the other man like this. Like he’s in pain. Bellamy makes no move to answer him and Cage chews on his food, twisting his lips to one side of his mouth as he considers him. “Don’t like that?”

Clarke is too busy watching the whole exchange to remember that she’s trying to ignore him, so when he glances flippantly over to her again, she gets caught with her eyes already on him, and his grin turns practically venomous at that.

“You laugh pretty,” he tosses over, looking her up and down as he says it. It makes Clarke never want to laugh again. He doesn’t say it to compliment her, he says it to give himself some sort of sick satisfaction. He doesn’t say it to make her feel good about herself, he says it like it’s going to earn him a trophy.

She swallows nervously, drops her eyes to the algae on her plate and she gulps it down before anyone says anything else, needing a stronger distraction.

“I know I do,” Murphy says, nodding his head over at Cage. He’s trying to take the attention away from Clarke, and she really appreciates it, but Cage is still watching her.

“You want to get out of here?” Wells turns around to ask, looking even more concerned.

God, she misses the days where she only had to worry about staying alive.

Bellamy is still gripping his forehead tightly, his shoulders clenched like he’s been electrocuted. He sat down next to them, as close as he dared, to keep an eye on the distance between her and Cage, to make sure he doesn’t make any more advances.

Part of Clarke wants to see what he’ll do if Cage pushes any further, another part of her is scared shitless. And the other part, well that part is just angry.

“We’re staying,”

He considers her for a moment, then shrugs, inwardly glad that she’s not going to run away.

“I saw Abby yesterday,” he offers as a way to make it clear that only the four of them are welcome to this conversation. “She said you and Raven should go and visit some time,”

“But she’s a commander,” Raven says. “We aren’t allowed up there,”

“Cage is allowed,” Wells shrugs again, leaning his head to the side to gesture to the man. “If he gets to break the rules to see his father then Clarke should get to do the same.”

“It’s okay. We can just find her when she’s in the med ward,” Clarke assures, ignoring the shiver that runs down her spine at being equated to him.

“Bellamy, will you just tell me what’s wrong?”

Echo’s voice is growing louder, sounding more angry as she questions him. It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore them when they are literally just on the other side of Wells.

Clarke risks throwing a glance over to Roan, but his face is completely neutral, ignoring everything around him in favor of eating whatever food is on his plate.

She wishes she were sat on Wells’ right; wishes they could swap places because Bellamy is clearly in pain.

“Roan, when are we getting out next?” he asks, surprising everyone, who have fallen into an awkward silence. His voice is strained but controlled; still powerful and still radiating a dominance because Cage is still watching him with hungry eyes.

Roan glances up with a resigned look on his face and he yawns before he answers, stretching out, unbothered by the bunched up row of people.

“Team meeting tonight. We’ll figure it out then,”

He glances briefly over to Clarke as he says it, nods shallowly to her to let her know that she’s still invited, to let her know that she still belongs there.

They keep talking, about guard duties and late night shifts, and each time Bellamy opens his mouth to speak it comes out pained and he has to put so much effort into it. She loses her breath more with every word and hopes no one notices.

Wells intertwines his legs with hers, feet crossing.

The four of them wait until the table has mostly emptied out before they leave. Cage lingers even after Roan walks out and settles in to talk to Echo, giving her half of his attention and holding the other half back to observe everyone else around him.

Each time he looks to the significant amount of space between Bellamy and Wells, he smirks. Cage says something about a conversation he needs to have with his father a while later, and he leaves them with a confident wave, a smug sense of satisfaction hanging thick in the air even after the doors have swung shut behind him.

Bellamy and Echo leave soon after, soon enough for Clarke to realize that they’d been ready to leave for ages and were just waiting for Cage to go too. He’s trying to be subtle, she thinks. He’s doing a pretty shitty job of it so far.

“I went shooting last night,” Clarke says as they drop their plates into the bucket at one end of the serving station.

“You did?”

“Yeah. And I’m going to join the Ark,”

She figures she may as well rip the bandaid off now. None of them have any sort of major reaction to what she says.

“Okay,” Murphy shrugs, falling into step beside her. “Wasn’t that the plan anyway?”

“It was. I’m joining tonight,”

“Tonight?” Raven questions, hints of skepticism tracing the words. “You’re sure?”

This isn’t what she wants. She thinks Clarke is going to push herself too far. Wells is walking beside Raven; they’ve got a guard shift today, so they’ll be leaving in a minute.

“I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t ready,” she answers, trying not to roll her eyes. They’re just worried about her, she knows that, but it’s still her life.

“And you’ve spoken to Roan about this?” Wells asks, voice neutral.

“Yep,”

“Well that’s it then,” Murphy sighs, a content smile dancing across his face. At least one of them can be happy for her: she needs to know that _someone_ doesn’t consider her a liability.

“Yeah,” Clarke says, feet landing heavier than normal against the tiles of the corridor. “That’s it.”

…

 

If Bellamy ever gets to anywhere other than the road, he knows he’s going to have to spend a long time adjusting to the feel of an actual bed. The ground, no matter how hard or how unforgiving it is to sleep on, will always be his favorite way to sleep so long as he’s got Clarke in his arms while he does it.

He’ll never get over how well she fits against him. A girl that small… people would take one look at the two of them and guess that he’d crush her from just a touch. They’d never understand how strong she is. Nobody ever will.

Maybe he doesn’t. He won’t give himself so much credit as to assume he can contain all of Clarke’s strength into the confines of his mind.

She’s even smaller tonight. Small enough that carrying her over from the truck is the easiest thing he’s ever had to do. Physically speaking, because obviously this is tearing him apart in every other way.

Watching her deteriorate like this, Bellamy knows the true meaning of torture now. It hurts when she snuggles her face even further into his chest as he holds her, and when she gets this sleepy smile on her face as her ear lands over his heart.

It’s just another reminder that this time next week, this time tomorrow, he might not get this again.

Loving Clarke Griffin is inescapable. It’s never going to fade away. It’s never going to die.

“The hospital,”

He’s brought the two of them back over to the campsite, not because he wanted to. The things that he heard Murphy saying cut deep. He knows he’s not good enough to love her like she should be loved, he’s always known that.

Bellamy knew that the second she saved his sister, saving her even after he’d forced Clarke’s best friend to leave her to die.

As much as he wants to rise above it all, for the sake of Clarke’s peace of mind, Bellamy just can’t. Just another reason why his love is wrong.

He’d been planning on laying Clarke down on to her pack when they came back over, hoping it might give her the rest she needs, but she didn’t give him much choice when she plastered her face against his neck, and leant her head on to his shoulder.

And so he kept her in his lap, crossing his body with hers, legs folded on the other side of him as she breathes into his skin.

Her forehead is clammy, and her nose won’t quit running but Bellamy holds her to himself tighter, just because.

It’s hard to tear his eyes away from her because he’s a pathetic, pathetic man and he’ll never get tired of looking at her face. He does though, because Raven sounds like she’s planning something and they’re kidding themselves if they think he’s not going to be in on it.

“What about it?” he asks and knows he should be making more of an effort to come across as civil but having to stop watching the way Clarke’s face falls completely blank in her sleep is enough to worsen his mood.

“We need to be prepared,”

“We are,” Octavia says from next to Murphy, more space between them than there should be.

Bellamy doesn’t really know what O is thinking about all of this. The things she was saying back over at the truck, she couldn’t honestly mean that. She painted him out to be good, to be right for Clarke.

“No we’re not,” Murphy tells no one. “We’ve got three and a half functioning fighters and that place is going to be a death trap. No question about it.”

“Taking her into the middle of it isn’t smart,” Bellamy says and takes the opportunity to look at Clarke again. A strand of her hair has fallen into her eyes and her nose is twitching adorably; still, he brushes it away as lightly as he can so that she doesn’t wake up from it. He also leaves his hand on her head, cupping her face, because she sighs when he touches her, and he likes hearing that. “She doesn’t need to be there; it’s just another risk.”

“Are you saying we need to split up?”

Raven sounds suspicious, sounds like she isn’t sure he knows what he’s saying.

He won’t rise to the bait, not yet. Bellamy just rolls his head and allows his head to nod once in confirmation.

“It’s too far away right now for her to stay here. By the time we get in and out she’ll be-”

He can’t stand to hear it actually said out loud.

Murphy seems to have the same problem because he whispers her name in warning, a soft ‘Octavia’ escaping from her lips in one easy cloud.

Her eyes snap over to him and narrow dangerously.

“What’s wrong Murphy? Too weak to say what we all know?”

Murphy doesn’t respond, just watches her as they both sit on either side of Bellamy and Clarke’s sprawled legs. Clarke makes a small sound against his neck; a muffled whimper and he draws his eyes away from the confrontation to see what she needs.

Her fist tightens in his shoulder, arm moving behind his back. Bellamy shushes her, presses his mouth against the side of her head as softly as he can.

“Then we take her halfway and some of us can get to the hospital and back to meet her,”

A silence settles over them, as they all consider Raven’s plan. There’s no denying that something is missing, that something within the whole group has been lost. Her voice isn’t here, she isn’t dictating the plan of action like she so subconsciously does.

“Clarke should be awake for this,” Octavia says, reading her brother’s mind. “If anyone knows how to strategize, it’s her,”

She’s right. Clarke was the one who planned Nebraska, Clarke was the one who had the final say in how long they could stay in the cottage, Clarke was the one who drove them halfway across the country. But she shouldn’t have to do that now.

“She needs to sleep,” Bellamy says, bringing her into his side a little more to stop the others from waking her up. She’s on her side, clinging to him like a sloth hugging a tree.

O watches the movement, focuses on the lack of space between him and Clarke, and lets a wry smile drift on to her face as she looks back to her brother.

“So you pulled your head out of your ass then?” she asks, nodding over to the truck.

“O…” he starts, needing her to not speak about this now.

She’d told him to just tell Clarke how he feels. She’d told him that he’d regret it for the rest of his life if he never did, but it would have been too selfish to do something like that now. Clarke already feels bad enough about dying, he can’t put that on her shoulders too.

Murphy makes a tutting sound with his teeth, disapproving, and whatever Bellamy was about to say to his sister gets lost.

“Really?” he snaps, trying to keep his voice down so as not to wake Clarke. “You don’t think you’ve said enough? You want to keep this going?”

It’s not what any of them need right now. They can hate him all they want once they’ve figured out a way to keep Clarke alive.

“Guys,” Raven warns. “This isn’t going to help anything,”

Murphy ignores her and smiles softly at Bellamy.

“Just because Clarke thinks I’m wrong doesn’t mean I am,” he says, voice easy and light and like he knows something that they don’t

Octavia opens her mouth, his name on her tongue but Bellamy doesn’t let her say anything.

“How dare you talk like that,” he seethes, struggling more and more to keep his voice down. “Like you think you’re better than the rest of us. How dare you say that you’re just looking out for her when you’re forcing her into the middle of it-”

“I won’t play happy families with someone who is making this ten times harder than it needs to be,”

Bellamy understands it, he does. In those first few days of them finding Murphy, Clarke was the only one who really made an effort with him. And she didn’t do it out of responsibility, or because they had pushed her away, she did it because she didn’t want anyone to feel alone.

She did it because she is good.

He knows that Murphy will be loyal to Clarke before he is loyal to anyone else, because she was the one who pulled him out of that stinking toilet cubicle, and she was the one to give him something human.

But it isn’t fair to make it sound like he is taking her death any harder than anyone else.

“Not even for her? That’s a little hypocritical don’t you think?”

“Bellamy now isn’t the time,” Raven sighs. “If we make it to the hospital quick enough then there’s still every chance that this doesn’t have to be the end of the line. This is our shot at keeping her alive. Isn’t that all that matters right now?”

She’s right. He knows she’s right. He closes his mouth and settles for silence while he shoots daggers at Murphy, the man opposite him catching each one as though he’s a shield. As though he’s a protector.

“If we leave now, we’ll be better off,” Octavia says.

“You three go to the hospital. I’ll carry Clarke halfway and as long as we stay on the highway, you guys will be able to find us,”

It’s not even a question in his mind. He isn’t going to leave her.

“Bellamy…” Raven starts, voice turned a little sympathetic.

“What?”

“I know you want to stay with her-”

“No,” he says, louder than he should. “No. This isn’t up for debate.”

Clarke squirms a little against him, her eyebrows drawing closed in discomfort, but he doesn’t know how to help.

“Here we go,”

“What now?!” Bellamy snaps, turning on Murphy again.

“Well, you can’t seriously think that you’ll be more useful on the side-lines,” he says as though it’s obvious.

Sure, he knows that he’s probably the fittest out of the lot of them. He’s the fastest runner and he’s got a higher amount of muscle probably than the rest of the combined, but that doesn’t matter. Not in this.

“She won’t want me away from her,” and if Clarke wants him by her side, then he’s going to be with her. He’s going to cherish whatever time he might have left with the girl who he might as well have dreamt up.

“It doesn’t matter what she wants. She needs medicine and you’re a good fighter, you’re going to be able to get in and out quicker,”

“Murphy,” he sighs, resignedly but still stern. “I’m staying with her and that’s final,”

“You don’t get the last say in this,” Raven tells him, sounding resolute.

“She’ll want me with her,”

How can they not see that? They’ve all seen how much they need each other. She needs him right now.

It’s Octavia’s voice that lets him know he’s fighting a losing battle. He’s always fighting a losing battle nowadays.

“Bell, you know you can’t stay away for long. Surely, that’s just more of a reason you should go. You’ll probably be faster,”

“See?” Murphy tries to look smug, maybe he’s just trying to lighten the mood. “Right yet again.”

But Bellamy doesn’t want a lighter mood if it means he’s going to have to leave Clarke.

“Shut it,”

“Murphy you’ve seen this sort of thing before, right? You know what we’re looking for?”

“Where the hell would you have seen this? Don’t pretend like you know any more about this than the rest of us.”

“Do your research before you start talking shit Blake,” Murphy drawls, rolling his eyes and stretching out. “It’s unbecoming. Yeah, I mean, I’ve never seen it anywhere near this bad, but I know what could help.”

“How convenient you’re only mentioning this now,”

“Bell,”

“Well, you may as well go then,” Raven nods to Murphy, completely ignoring Bellamy and rightly so. “You’ll be okay. We’ll give you a gun and it’s not like you can’t run with your arm like that.”

“Yeah, I’ll go.”

“See Reyes?” Bellamy tries, because he’s desperate. “You can go and have some alone time with your boyfriend.”

“Stop being a dick, Bellamy. And I’m staying with Clarke. I can carry her.”

“You don’t need to,” he bristles, shaking his head because this is all wrong. His arm curls even tighter around Clarke’s thinning waist and she gives him another content sigh in response. “I carry her.”

Raven scoffs before she replies: “You know that you’re a better shot than the rest of us. Even if it’s just marginally, it counts that you’re better. If you don’t go, then you’re letting what we’ve been thinking become true. You’d be making a selfish decision.”

She’s a smart girl and she always has been. Bellamy might not be at the level of an MIT engineer, but he can be smart too. He can see what she’s trying to do.

“I’m not going to let you emotionally blackmail me into leaving her. I’m staying with Clarke.”

Raven opens her mouth to reply but she’s cut off when Clarke starts to say something, murmuring softer than she would do if she were awake. They all still to listen, just in case she needs anything.

Bellamy turns his head, forehead leaning on to hers so he can absorb her small whimpers, so that he can try to take her pain away.

“Bellamy,” she whispers when her lips part shallowly, her breath coming out too desperately, too quickly to be normal. It’s the way she says his name, always the way she says his name, that pulls him in. She says it like it means something, like he is worth something.

“I’m here,” he says, too quiet for the others to hear. They don’t need to hear.

She does this, probably more than she realizes: says his name in her sleep. Every time it’s different. He still remembers the night she said it while she was biting her lip, while she was digging her nails into his neck a little harder than normal, while her cheeks were burning pink even in her slumber.

“Bellamy, this is what she would choose,” Octavia says lowly, so as not to disturb Clarke. “If it were you in danger she’d be using her head. She’d be running to that hospital and she’d be back before you know it because all that’d matter is keeping you alive.”

Murphy makes a sound of approval _._ Bellamy knows exactly what he’s trying to say. He knows Clarke would be doing the right thing, the stronger thing.

“But what if…” he starts, forces his voice to sound bolder than his words. “What if she leaves before I get back to her?”

“You can’t think like that,” Raven says as she shakes her head to the ground, eyes cast tightly to the floor because this is just as hard for her.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Bellamy can’t help but scowl out of jealousy. “You get to stay.”

She raises her head and it isn’t anger in her face anymore, and it’s not determination. It’s just pain. Just disappointment.

“Are you trying to carry this on, Bellamy?”

“But she needs me,” he tries, one last shot. One last bullet in the holster. She’s said as much, in a thousand different ways. She needs him just as much as he needs her.

“She doesn’t need you,” Murphy says tiredly, not even bothering to look at anyone as he tuts his teeth, moving instead to Clarke’s bag to push it on to his shoulders before he thinks better of it. “We’ll have to split this out,”

Raven snatches it away from him in the next moment, clearly not happy with him rooting through Clarke’s stuff. It’s a bit harsher than Bellamy would have expected her to act towards him, but Murphy’s definitely not trying to resolve any of the tension.

“It’s Clarke remember,” she tries to remind Bellamy, a lot softer. “She’s strong on her own.”

He knew that. Of course he knew that. But that isn’t the point.

“But she doesn’t have to be. She’s got me.”

He doesn’t care that his voice gives up on him. It breaks and it crackles pathetically. Clarke doesn’t need to be strong on her own anymore, not if she doesn’t want to be. He’ll hold her, he’ll catch her, always. He’s hers now. And that only rings a hundred times louder when she mumbles his name again, the word tumbling from her bottom lip, the one with slashes through it that remind him of when it all turned to shit.

The number of times he’s been tempted, so tempted to just lean in. To just hide that naturally rosied bottom lip from the world, to hold it between both of his and caress it until it healed on its own.

Her hair has fallen into her eyes again, inevitably. Bellamy brushes it back, twists it around his finger on the way to let her know that they don’t have to be two separate people anymore, that if she needs to be, they can become one body, one beating heart.

She’s already got his for the rest of forever.

“Look I know you’re trying to be romantic and all. But it’s really not the time for it.”

“Murphy, you say one more shitty thing like that, and I’ll break your other arm, you got it?” Octavia snarls impatiently, her eyes wavering on Clarke like she’s trying to figure out how much time they’ve got left.

The man opposite shuts up resolutely, teeth snapping shut. He stands to his feet and takes a few steps to the right, to the direction that they’ll need to be travelling in eventually.

“Bell,” his sister offers. She scoots over to him, so that Clarke is tucked comfortably between the two of them. Raven stands up too, probably to go and join Murphy, perhaps to go and say their goodbyes privately. The three of them are left alone and he’s thankful for that. “If you stay here, and Clarke dies, you’ll never forgive yourself and you know it. This is your shot; this is your chance to be the man that she knows you are. Don’t screw it up, big brother,”

“I’m not the hero, O,”

“And you don’t have to be,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Clarke doesn’t need you to be. She’s not the hero either. We aren’t saints. But she’ll be so damn proud of you if you do this, and you know that,”

“Okay,” he relents, looking between the two most important people in his life. “But Octavia?”

Her head shoots up, knowing she’s won him over, still with that sad smile on her face and tears in her eyes.

“Don’t let her die without me there. If she’s going to die, she deserves to have me there when it happens,”

It’ll kill him. He knows that. But it’s what she will need, and so there’s no doubt in his mind that it’s what he’ll have to do.

“You’re a good man, Bellamy,” his sister nods, and leans in to hug him. It is light and soft and barely there because they’ve got Clarke in between them, but he grips on to her shoulders to tell her to keep safe, mumbles it into her ear so that it is written into stone.

“I shouldn’t wake her, right?”

“You should say goodbye,” Octavia says as they part.

“But I shouldn’t wake her,”

He’ll be quick- he needs to be.

“Could, could you give us a minute?” Bellamy asks, eyes falling back to Clarke and how she has started to drool on to his shoulder a little.

“Of course,” she answers and leans in to kiss him on the cheek before she’s scampering away, off to help the others share out Clarke’s things.

He knows what he’s going to do to say goodbye, because he isn’t strong enough to look into her eyes, the ones he thinks about every night before he falls asleep, and tell her that this might be the last time they see each other.

Instead he shuffles her down to the ground, tucking his fleece under her head to act as a cushion, and he walks over to the nearest car with the window rolled down.

Bellamy leans into it, reaches for the glove compartment and snaps it open, ignoring the sunglasses case that topples down, and the engine manual, and the few tubes of lip gloss. Instead, he grabs at the roadmap that sits at the bottom of it, snaps at a pen that is resting behind it, and marches back over to Clarke because he’s running out of time and he knows it.

He flicks off the lid of the red sharpie once she’s settled back on to the place she belongs, right there in the corner of his collarbone, and he opens the map as wide as he can in the small space he’s got.

‘You should still write,’ she told him once. So he will. He’ll write.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'The stars, mean nothing without you,'  
> \- Lay Me Down, Sam Smith


	27. It's in the eyes, I can tell you will always be danger

The day passes by as uneventfully as Clarke could expect, considering where she is now. Murphy offers to hang out with her while she goes to the gym, and so they end up like that for a couple hours, with him spotting her for weights that neither of them should really be lifting.

It drowns out all the noise of everything else, and the two women at the other end of the room give them more space than necessary. Clarke doesn’t know who they are, and guesses they’re probably part of the Ark, so she’ll meet them when she has to.

Murphy asks her about Abby, but not in the way that Wells does. He doesn’t expect any sort of reconciliation between the two of them, and so she doesn’t really feel the pressure that Wells has put on it.

“How’s your Mom?” he asks, sounding like he doesn’t actually care that much.

Clarke has spoken to her twice since she got out of her hospital room, and both conversations happened while they were skating on thin ice. Lots of ‘I hope you’re feeling better’s’ that show how much she doesn’t understand what Clarke had to do. Lots of ‘I’ll see you around’s’ that made Clarke realize how little she knows about her mother’s responsibilities here.

She’s supposed to be a Commander, and so she has a say in how this place is controlled. But it also means she’s never actually around.

“I don’t know,” Clarke answers through inflamed cheeks and lungs that can’t catch enough air. She’s used to that feeling though.

“I know you two should be together-”

“Don’t Murphy,” she warns, cutting him off before he can start any kind of lecture about the debt she owes to the universe for bringing her back to her mother.

“No, I wasn’t gonna-”

“You don’t know what we were like before the infection,”

“Griffin I’m saying you shouldn’t feel guilty if you can’t play happy families,” he huffs, as though he is the one who’s working out, and isn’t just sitting there with his hands out to catch the dumbbell.

Clarke doesn’t say much more, too surprised.

“It’s not your obligation to chase after relationships that don’t make sense anymore,”

“Why do I feel like we aren’t just talking about my mother?”

“I’m giving you epiphany-worthy advice Griffin. You could just start listening for once,”

“ _You_ need to start hanging out with Wells less often. He’s making you… emotional,”

Murphy scoffs condescendingly and Clarke places the dumbbell back on to the holders of the bench before she leans her weight on to the bar and heaves herself up behind it, sitting upright so she can take a break.

“And I’m not chasing Bellamy,” she tells him and stretches her shoulder out above her head.

“I’m not saying you are. I’m saying you don’t have to feel bad about starting fresh, moving on, getting over him,”

“You seem to be saying an awful lot today,”

She gets out from under the bar and walks over to the wall, sitting against it until it makes her thighs feel like fire.

“I’m not an idiot, Murphy. I see how he is with Echo,”

Clarke considers what she’s said, once she’s said it, and wonders what she actually sees when they’re together. If the tepid, almost forced nature to their movements feels wrong just because it’s a product of her own scorn.

“If it helps, she’s got the personality of a jellyfish,”

“That doesn’t help,” Clarke sighs, pushing away from the wall so that she can get low on the mat nearby.

Murphy slumps down next to her on his stomach as he waits for her to do a round of pushups.

“He doesn’t owe me anything,” that one tastes like a lie. “Now can we get back to worrying about how on Earth I’m meant to be acting around my mom?”

“I’d rather talk about why Bellamy was sat next to Wells in the mess today. Don’t think we missed that,”

Clarke collapses on to the mat after doing twenty in a row, and lets her arms sprawl out spread eagle as she waits for them to stop shaking.

“You know, if you all stopped psychoanalyzing my life, you’d realize how much more there is to think about,”

“Now why would we do that when yours is just so riveting?” he snarks, both elbows pressing divots into the mat they’re on so that he can hold his head up. She knows he’s being sarcastic, and dramatic, but he still sits and waits for an answer. To which question she can’t quite figure out.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she settles on.

“If you don’t talk about it with me, you won’t talk about it with anyone,”

“And you know that, how?”

“Because Wells doesn’t know Bellamy like you need him to, and you don’t want Raven to worry,”

Everything he says is the truth, and she hates how well he can read her. Clarke really doesn’t want to tell him about what happened with Cage, and so she can’t tell him about what happened with Bellamy.

“Octavia apologized yesterday,” she confesses instead, hoping that this will be enough to stop him wondering. “And I couldn’t forgive her. I don’t even know why: I’m not angry that she wasn’t there, like in a way, I get it,”

“You don’t think it’s too little too late?”

“I think that I am not the person she should be apologizing to,”

He makes a grumbling sound and rolls on to his back, hands folded over each other on top of his stomach as he gazes up at the ceiling like it might help him with something. Clarke copies him, because she’s tired.

“Raven’s pretending to be alright about it all,”

“I know,” she says, eyes dropping to her laced trainers.

“But she’s not,”

“I know,”

He’s quiet. Maybe they’re both looking at the same crack in the peeling plaster of the wall.

“I’m sorry that I did this to all of you,”

Clarke says it so quietly that she doesn’t even know if the words leave her lips. Murphy has no reaction to it, none at all for so long, and so maybe they didn’t. She hurt them, and maybe she wasn’t the only reason that Bellamy and Octavia hurt them, but she factored into that too.

“I forgive you,”

She opens her mouth to thank him, but he starts speaking again.

“But if you die now Griffin, then I’m seriously going to kill you,”

“That sounds fair,” she tells him, smiling fondly because he isn’t the same man that he was when she found him.

He really has grown. He’s learnt how to trust.

“Murphy?”

“Yes Clarke?” he asks amusedly. His eyebrow raises but his whole face is upside down from where they’re both lying, so really, it’s sinking.

“You said I had the easy way out. That he has to live with the weight of his wrong love on his shoulders,”

“Yeah?”

“You were wrong,”

“Not this again,” Murphy sighs and she can picture his expression as she watches the ceiling, blank and tired and preparing for a battle.

“No. You were. Because I don’t think he ever really loved me at all,”

He considers her, and Clarke is glad that she can’t see his face now.

“He’s still a mess, Clarke,”

“We are all a mess, and he’s still reeling from the loss of his mother. If Wells were dead then I’d probably be like him too. But he’s moved on,”

“You don’t see-”

“I don’t have to see anything. I know what I felt out there. Wells told me love is dangerous now, and that’s something I knew all along. I knew we’d get hurt eventually, so it’s my own fault for letting my feelings get as far as they did. That isn’t Bellamy’s fault,”

“He should have been there,” Murphy says, adamant. He won’t be convinced of anything else.

“I know,” Clarke admits, because he definitely should have. But he wasn’t and dwelling on that isn’t going to fix anything.

If they’re going to be fighting on the same team, then she’ll have to get over what he did.

The girls at the other end of the gym are whispering, clearly talking about Clarke and Murphy, who are obnoxiously sprawled on the exercise mat at the heart of the room, clearly judging them for not even trying to look like they’re working out.

“I never said… the night before the hospital. I wanted you to know: you didn’t kill Emori,”

“Clarke-”

“No. You didn’t kill her,”

“Well, you know what they say,” he sighs again. “Love is always gonna be a weakness,”

And maybe it is. She didn’t want to accept that before.

But she’s been weak for weeks, and that’s because she’s mourning a relationship that never actually happened. Maybe if she forgets about all the reasons she fell in love, she might get to be strong again.

“What are we doing next?” Murphy asks after a long, content silence. “Braiding friendship bracelets for each other?”

“Sorry,” Clarke shrugs, heaving herself to her feet and brushing down her thighs before she offers him a hand up. “Me and Raven have already scheduled that in for tomorrow night.”

 

…

 

She’s right. They don’t make friendship bracelets. Clarke isn’t really too sure what they end up doing with the rest of the day, it just passes. That’s what time does now, it passes.

He doesn’t push for any thing more than what she gave him in the gym, but neither does she. Clarke doesn’t ask about what’s going on with Raven, and so he respects that she is torn up on the inside without mentioning it.

Time passes uneventfully until around five in the afternoon, when she punches a hole in the wall of Murphy’s room.

They must have come in here at some point to hang out. It’s practically a mirror image of hers and Raven’s, and they’re sat on his bed, pushed up against the wall with the ceiling forcing them to duck awkwardly.

They aren’t even talking about anything important. It’s nothing. But she’s in the corner of the room and it just happens. One moment they’re cross-legged and all snark, and the next she’s shouting, hurtling her fist through the wall and she doesn’t know what she’s doing but something inside of her expected there to be pain.

And yet time doesn’t stop passing. Murphy doesn’t even say anything. It’s almost as though he’s been waiting for this all along.

She pushes her face into the plaster, just above the gaping hole, and her body melts. Is it strange that she hasn’t cried yet? Maybe she should. That’d be a more normal reaction to whatever has happened. She should definitely be crying but her eyes are dry, and Clarke can’t see a point in it.

Her knuckles are bleeding, but whose aren’t nowadays? She can join the club.

The sound that ripped through her throat doesn’t sound like a noise she should ever be able to make. It reminds her of the noises that live in her nightmares.

They don’t address it when Clarke manages to tense her neck enough to lift her head back to where it was before, and they just keep talking about whatever shit they were talking about before.

Wells will see the hole in the wall. Maybe Murphy will cover for her because he won’t be able to leave it alone when he finds out.

 

…

 

“I told you we should have left it alone,”

So, apparently the rec room does actually have a use for something. It isn’t permanently barren like Clarke had supposed it would be, because the first and only time she came in here was when her and Raven didn’t want to go and eat down in the mess.

It feels stupidly like a college living area, with the kitchen counter acting as some sort of divider between the kitchen itself and a living room.

Clarke has hopped up on to the counter, swinging legs and fingers tapping their way to the recurves of her bow along the too loose string.

“You tried your best,” she smirks, then removes the synthetic band of fibers from one end.

Raven leans away from her, clearly worried about the recoil.

“You just made the string too long,”

Wells and Murphy are sat on one of the stacks of sparring mats. There are three other empty ones, and a couple of foldable chairs scattered around. Those are the kind that have those tiny baskets in the arms to hold flasks and mugs.

Both of them are perched on the edge. Murphy has his head in his hand, like he normally does, his elbow digging his knee, while Wells is sat upright with his legs kicked out and crossed at the ankles.

It’s around ten to nine, and the meeting is supposed to start in ten minutes. Apparently they’re always held in here, because it’s one of the only places that they have complete privacy from non-members, and where they can fit everyone in.

“First bit of advice,” Wells says, turning to Clarke. “These things always start half an hour after whenever Roan says they will,”

“So why are we here early?”

“Because this is your first day as part of the Ark,”

He shrugs like that was clear from the start. Moron.

“What are you planning on doing? Am I gonna get cake?” Clarke grins knowingly, preoccupied with stretching the string out across the span of her arms to see how long it should be.

Raven hops down, already bored of sitting and waiting, and she paces around the counter to mooch along the cupboards of the barren kitchen as though they might actually have food in them.

“Always asking for more,” Raven grins, throwing the smile over her shoulder flippantly.

“What’s up with your hand?” Wells asks when he stands to his feet as well.

“My what?”

Clarke shoves down the sleeve of the hoodie she’s wearing- it’s black and about two sizes too big, but it was the warmest one she could find in the storerooms, and she quite likes the bagginess of it, it covers everything she doesn’t want people to see. She knew Wells would find out about the hole she punched in his wall, she just thought she might have more time than this.

Hiding her hand in her sleeve probably isn’t the best solution, but her cheeks are already burning red and it’s panic mode.

“My what?” she asks again, widened eyes darting over to Murphy who has his head leant back against the wall.

“Clarke?”

She balls her hand into a fist beneath the thick layer of fabric, letting the bowstring hang to the floor.

“I’m fine Wells,” she sighs and silently pleads Murphy to intervene.

He comes through, thankfully, and stands to slap Wells on the shoulder.

“You’re seeing things, Bud,”

“I’m just saying, he didn’t have to make you out to be some sort of cre- oh, sorry,”

Octavia wasn’t looking where she was going when she walked into the room, both arms held out in front of her so she could push the door open. She’s talking to someone behind her, so it takes a moment or two for her to notice everyone already here.

The same man who has been with her every time they’ve been in the mess is trailing behind. The same man who pulled Bellamy away from Murphy.

Octavia glances, like a deer caught in the headlights, around the room, flickering between each person and when she sees Raven, her gaze lingers sadly.

“I didn’t-”

“It’s fine,” Clarke snaps, because she doesn’t want to see that look in Octavia’s eyes. She doesn’t deserve to look sad right now. She is the one who should be making an effort to put things right.

Octavia dawdles on the tips of her feet, bouncing, until she realizes that no one is going to say anything else to her. She turns around to the man behind her, dithers for another moment, and then they’re walking over to the stack of mats opposite where Murphy and Wells had been sitting.

The door is on the other end of the room from the kitchen, so at least her and Raven are on opposite sides. The bare area of mats is a similar size to what a teenager’s basement might be like; enough room for a ping pong table to fit inside.

The kitchen area- if you could even call it that with a few cupboards and a turned off fridge, a coffee pot that probably hasn’t been used in months, and some empty cookie jars- is much smaller, definitely like a college dorm’s.

This whole space will probably fit around twenty people inside of it comfortably.

“You’re one of us now?” Octavia asks after a few endless moments of cringeworthy silence.

Without missing a single beat, Raven slams the plastic mug she was drinking water from down on to the counter, much too loudly to be casual.

“She was _always_ one of us,”

Clarke has never heard her sound so cold. It’s cold enough to freeze the whole room and Clarke is lucky that she chose now to restring her bow, because at least she’s got something to occupy herself with.

Murphy hops up on the corner of the kitchen counter, by the sink that doesn’t work, opposite Clarke if she were to be facing him. Wells chooses to sit next to her, shoulders brushing, because she knows he’s still looking for her hand.

It’s awkward again. Clarke doesn’t know if it’s her place to speak anything into the room, so she doesn’t. She looks down at her watch and there’s still five minutes until Roan is meant to get here.

The man at the other end of the room, perched with spread knees, taking up space that he doesn’t actually have to take up, jumps up to his feet out of nowhere. He brushes his hands down across his thighs and Clarke takes in his camo cargo trousers. Standard issue.

Octavia looks up to him as he moves, almost hopefully. Almost as though she’s got faith in him about something.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” he says, quieter than you’d expect someone of his frame to speak. It barely takes him eight steps before he’s over to Clarke, which isn’t normal either. “I’m Lincoln.”

He holds his hand out, his arms practically tree trunks, and Clarke hesitates to give him hers, just out of reflex.

She shoves the instinct away and takes his hand, hating how her scarred skin ripples against his palm. His face is scaled in a way that kind of makes him look perfect, objectively, and what must she look like in comparison? Frankenstein’s fucking monster.

Her hand is tiny in his; she can’t even see it when he shakes it once, gently.

“Clarke-” Griffin. But he already knows her name, surely. This is all just pleasantries. “Uh, yeah. I’m Clarke,” as though he needs to be told.

“You sure about that?” he asks lightly, voice nothing but soft and quiet. Clarke looks over to Octavia, unsure of what is actually going on, and there’s that pride still there in the way she’s looking at this guy.

“Pretty sure,” she answers, hoping the fake smile is convincing enough.

“You need a hand with that?”

Even if she’s elevated by the countertop, Lincoln is still towering over her. He has to actually look down when he points to her bow, if you could even call it that when it doesn’t have a string tied into it.

“I’m good,” she would thank him, but she can’t tell if he’s being genuine or if he’s just trying a little too hard.

Wells snorts on her side. “I thought you were Clarke,”

It snaps something in the air. That one pathetic dad joke makes everyone in the room release the breaths that they’ve been holding inside desperately.

Raven is still burning daggers into the wall opposite her, but Clarke guesses that that might just be a regular occurrence considering they’re on the same team.

Lincoln laughs through his nose, and he might be forcing it a little, because it wasn’t even funny, but he’s still trying.

The door swings open again.

“Okay,” Roan announces, a green cap balancing on his head as he strides in. “Go time.”

He’s got this stupid _smug_ smile on his face, but it takes reaching the protruding counter for him to realize he’s projecting for no reason. He leans over it, elbows tucking into his stomach, and Clarke wriggles to the left some more, forcing Wells into the wall.

“Where is everyone?” he asks, trying to sound casual. It doesn’t work; he looks up to the ceiling with his face pulled tight in frustration. “Every damn time,”

“You know, if you arranged this shit for an hour before you actually wanted to start…” Murphy comments, more interested in the tap he’s fiddling with.

“Go time for what?” Clarke cuts him off, throwing a smirk to the two behind her.

“Literally nothing,” Murphy answers instead of the object of her question. “He just has a knack for flair.”

Roan winks, not really at anyone in particular, and then leans even further forward to grab at an arrow from behind Clarke’s back. She swats him away easily.

Two more women come in, who Clarke has seen in the middle of the Ark table. They don’t say anything but she’s never seen them talk to any of the people in this room already so Clarke doesn’t see why they’d start now.

One of them is looking funny at her, discretely, face down at the floor or over at the other woman, but eyes trailing over Clarke. She can’t figure if she’s being checked out or if she’s being judged, but the girl has the kind of face that is quite hard to read.

“Gaia with the short hair,” Wells moves to whisper into her ear. “Niylah on the right.”

“Gaia. Niylah. Got it,”

“Both of them hate Roan, but they can fight and they don’t have any family here so they joined up,”

Clarke nods, without much to add.

They take seats on the floor near to Octavia, but they don’t say anything to her.

Roan is talking to Murphy and Raven behind them, so Clarke pours her focus on to the string of her bow, winding it and ravelling it into the right length.

A few more people trickle in over the next twenty minutes but she doesn’t linger her gaze on any of them. Wells keeps murmuring in her ear little bits of information that she might be able to use to cling to any sort of the familiarity that he has with these people.

It’s hard to remember that he’s been living with them this whole time.

A man, who was definitely in the military in his life before, approaches them at one point. He leans on the wall opposite Wells, makes polite conversation once he’s introduced himself to Clarke as ‘Nyko’. It turns out he’s the other medic, and they seem to have bonded over that crushing responsibility.

Wells sees that Clarke isn’t up for chatting too much, because he takes control in the discourse, gesturing casually and spreading out in the space. This is his arena, she notices.

Echo enters the room when it is almost full of people, and Clarke takes a small ounce of smugness for herself when she sees that she’s alone. Only for a moment, only until she remembers that Bellamy will be here in the next.

A man wearing a beanie comes in with two others, “Miller, Bryan and Jackson,” Wells gives her, and there’s something in the way that the former one looks at her. He seems angry at Clarke, and he skirts the room like he doesn’t want to be near her.

She counts the people in the room, sees someone else come in and drop down by the Niylah chick.

Of course Bellamy would be the last one in. Maybe, if she’s lucky, he won’t come at all.

Clarke is just about to hop down off the counter, so that she can stand on the corner of her bow, but then Roan claps his hands together and she guesses she should probably wait until he’s done talking.

She expected it to be formal, but it isn’t.

It’s just him talking to a group about the hours they want to do, and the radio calls they’ve been receiving. Only the commanders are allowed access to the radios. They give Roan the information that they want him to know. Clarke guesses that they are the ones who pick and choose which calls for help get answers.

It’s not right, but she doesn’t get to decide who does and doesn’t have power in this place.

He doesn’t talk to her like she’s a newbie. He doesn’t make her stand up on top of the counter, say her name and a fun fact about herself, like she’d thought he might for some reason. It’s just calm.

Nobody actually listens to any of the shit he’s talking about. Clarke expects the individual conversations to die down but they don’t. Roan just talks over them and addresses the people that he wants to address.

Wells is clearly a favourite with these people; Raven too. They are the ones that the strangers gravitate to and Raven does an amazing job of pretending that Octavia isn’t even in the room.

Clarke catches her, occasionally, looking over. She doesn’t forget what Octavia said yesterday, about how she had to mourn on her own. Clarke expects that that was during in the first month, when she died for the first time. Raven and Murphy would have been preoccupied with being by her side. They chose Clarke over Octavia. She can see why Octavia would be upset, with all of them.

And the girl had a loyalty to her brother, at the end of the day. She wouldn’t just come running back to Raven and the rest of them if Bellamy won’t. He was, and always will be, her priority. And she will always be his.

In turn, Octavia catches Clarke watching her. She gives her a look of acknowledgement, and nothing more. She’s just as confused by all of this as the rest of them, and there’s no doubt about it.

Maybe Raven doesn’t see that, when she chose to stay with Clarke, she chose to ignore her other friends’ grief. She made that choice just as much as the Blakes made theirs.

Whoever came in last left the door open, wedged by one of the weights from the gym. Clarke is trying to laugh at one of Wells’ awful dad jokes when the room shifts.

It gets louder and quieter all at once. It feels empty and claustrophobic at the same time. The smile dies on her lips when his voice rings through the room, thunders and the camaraderie evaporates.

“What is she doing here?”

Bellamy’s silhouette takes up the width of the doorway, his shoulders pushed back. He’s not even looking at her. His face is tired, as it always is, and blank. He’s smirking, barely, but there’s no humour in his eyes. She’d kill to see him at least smile now. Clarke hasn’t seen that in so long.

Roan and him are almost on opposite ends of the room, with the former leaning lazily against the wall, arms folded.

Bellamy looks like he’s waiting for something, like he won’t cross the boundary into the room until he’s got it. His boot is tapping heavily against the floor, and Clarke knows that eyes aren’t trained on him, they’re trained on her.

Clarke watches Bellamy for as long as it takes to commit his stance to memory: giving nothing away at all, just like he’s done with everything else the world has had to give. An aged, drowned man.

She switches back to Roan, snapping her head directly to the right of her, and she sees him level Bellamy with that feline, predatory expression. The same he had with Clarke when he reminded her of her place.

“ _She_ ,” he begins, smiling ever so subtly. “is our newest member,”

He turns his head shallowly, winks when he makes eye contact with Clarke.

“Was practically banging my door down to let her join,”

He looks down to the floor, to the cluster of people darting their eyes between the three of them.

“It was say yes or get shot,” Roan finishes with a grin, as though sharing a joke.

Nobody laughs. Bellamy is seething too much, lips clamped shut, chewing them when he isn’t speaking like he’s digesting what Roan is answering with. She can hear the cogs working his brain, they all can.

Wells brushes his shoulder against hers and Clarke flinches involuntarily. He notices and does it again so that she looks up at him. He asks if she’s going to be okay with this with his eyes only, his face so close that she can see all of the blue marks along his healing nose.

Clarke doesn’t nod her head, but she tightens her hold on the midsection of her bow and hopes he can read her own eyes enough to know that she’s saying yes. She turns back to Bellamy, and his head is shooting back to Roan fast enough to give him whiplash. If he was looking at Clarke, he clearly doesn’t want her to know. Or maybe he just can’t. The muscles of his face tighten and clench, jaw grinding audibly. Whatever he just saw, it’s only made this worse.

“You think this is funny?” he demands, voice dropping in volume. “You think sending a girl who has just spent four months in a hospital bed into something like that is gonna turn out alright?”

Murphy snorts. He really is on the other side of the room, still pushed up by the sink. Clarke wants to tell him to shut the hell up but he’s got other ideas.

“Like you’d know anything about that,” he says dryly, meeting Bellamy’s eye across miles.

Selfishly, Clarke is glad he says it. It deserves to be spoken out loud. How dare he stand there and pretend he knows how stable she is, pretend he knows how those four months have affected her.

“Murphy,” Wells growls, turning slightly to throw a warning glance behind him.

Bellamy doesn’t react, he just focuses back on Roan, ignoring everything else.

“You haven’t answered my question. This isn’t a joke,”

And without missing a single beat, without hesitating or considering the effect it might have on the room, Murphy jumps on his comment.

“Is that what she is to you?”

“Murphy,” Wells hisses, quietening.

Niylah stands to her feet, stretching as she talks.

“Is this a conversation we need to be having in front of everyone?”

Clarke gets a better look at her now that she’s drawn everyone’s attention, and she looks youthful, with pointed features. She’s the type of girl that Clarke would have taken home a few years ago.

Her eyes flicker over to Clarke again, almost apologetically.

“Well seeing as Clarke is part of the team now-”

“No,” For all the impatience Bellamy has been radiating for Roan to answer him, he’s not exactly bothered about cutting him off. “We aren’t doing this. She just woke up from a season long _coma_ ,”

A shudder works its way down Clarke’s spine. They’re all still talking as though she’s not even here, and she might as well not be with her inability to speak. To say anything that would fight her corner.

He still won’t even look at her, still has his arms folded across his torso as he blocks the exit.

Roan is still trying to find the lightness in the corner of the room. There isn’t any, she wants to say. The air is brittle and Bellamy is getting ready to snap it.

“And she’s still probably twice the fighter that half of you lot are,”

Clarke looks down to the floor and Raven looks up to her, clearly trying not to smile at that because she’s sat, thinner and most definitely weaker than any of the people in this room, gripping to a disassembled bow.

Roan hasn’t seen her fight. Neither have any of the people here, so no one is going to believe that. She doesn’t believe that.

“That’s not what I’m trying to say,” Bellamy bristles and Clarke snaps up to him because maybe, just for a second, his face might have faltered.

“Then what _are_ you trying to say?” Roan asks, rushing. For the first time, he doesn’t sound polite, or like he’s trying to keep the peace. He’s losing it too now.

“It’s too much of a risk,”

Out of nowhere, completely unexpectedly, Octavia is the one to scoff. “Heard that one before,” she says, clearly trying to be quiet, but not succeeding. She clears her throat and then focuses back to the floor, curling up.

Wells leans in to her ear so that he can whisper and not break the thick silence weighing down the room.

“Fix your bow, Clarke,” he mumbles, face behind hers so that no one hears.

“What?”

“Just fix your bow,”

He wants her to make it clear that she’s staying. Maybe, because her tongue is tied to nothing more than a whisper, this is the only way to say anything at all.

He looks at her like he’s got faith, because he always does.

Clarke feels eyes burning into her, but she doesn’t look over to Bellamy because she doesn’t want to see how angry he is. She goes back to stringing her bow, hopping down from the counter and walking all the way around it to the kitchen area so that she has space to stand on the recurve.

“She can pull her own weight,” Wells announces to the room, slowly and forcing himself to sound calm.

Bellamy is still in the doorway, chewing the inside of his cheek, staring daggers at Roan.

“You’re really gonna send her on a suicide mission the second she gets her life back?” he asks, almost incredulous if he weren’t so blatantly fuming. He’s been making an effort to at least sound patient, but that is dwindling now with each inch his voice climbs. He’s losing it more and more each second, and Clarke is glad that she’s closest to Murphy because she doesn’t want to be close to Bellamy when he breaks.

“How many times do I have to say it? She’s part of the Ark and last time I checked, I get final say on this shit,” Roan pushes away from the wall, ready for this to be over with.

Clarke puts her foot on the recurve of her bow and threads her leg through it, ready to push for the string to slide back into its grooves.

Bellamy uncurls his arms, puts one hand on the edge of the doorway.

“No,” he says, shaking his head, adamant. “Not on this,”

His voice is getting painfully louder. He’s twisting the air around the room to his own will, he’s bending and flexing it and letting everyone here know that he isn’t playing around. He’s definitely getting ready to snap it.

Roan tilts his head to the side, still with that wry smile and looking more like a predator than she’s seen yet.

“And why’s that?” he asks curiously, calmly. As though he’s in the middle of a civil conversation. And as he simmers, Bellamy only feeds off of the anger draining out into the room.

The air shatters like glass, raining down all around Clarke’s feet when Bellamy shouts.

“Because she’s not _your_ people!”

Lost it.

He echoes it so violently around the room that they are left with silence so fragile you could hear a pin drop. Clarke’s bowstring decides to snap into place now, and the recoil of it spreads the shards of air throughout the rest of the room.

Raven rises slowly to her feet as Clarke slings her reformed bow back over her shoulder, the tight strap of it cutting across her chest in the way that it should.

She hops up on to the counter next to Murphy, only because he’s the closest one to her and definitely not because it’s as far away from Bellamy as she can get. His eyes are actually burning holes through Roan, and he is refusing to look anywhere else.

“You’re right,” Raven says as she walks over to sit beside Wells. “She’s _our_ people,”

And he finally reacts. His eyes close over as though blown shut by a gale and his breathing is visibly ragged, chest rising and falling slowly but deeply. And he doesn’t reopen his eyes, he just stands there in the doorway, like he might be able to will away whatever is crawling through him.

Someone clears their throat and meets Clarke’s eyes. She thinks he might be called Sterling.

“Are you really as good a shot as they’re saying?” he asks, nodding to the side, over at Wells with an unimpressed look on his face. “Heard you shot a walker twice in one eye while your face and hands were all torn up.”

Clarke doesn’t really know what he’s trying to do. Maybe it’s just to ease the awkwardness that has settled over them. Maybe they don’t really know how to act with Clarke as a new addition, but he’s clearly trying to pretend things are normal and so she clears her throat too, swallows the lump that has gathered in the middle of it, and answers him.

“Only the one hand,” she says but he looks confused. “My, uh, my other hand was fine,”

Murphy snorts again.

“Me and Miller have a bet, you see,” he breezes on forward, nodding over at the man wearing a beanie who doesn’t look up but waves his hand flippantly. “He thinks they’ve been exaggerating it all just to keep your life support going,”

She does a quick sweep of the rest of the room too and lands on Echo. She’s got her hands clasped, leaning over and crouched, legs spread shamelessly. Clarke can see the outline of a knife in the pocket of her pants and her smirk is menacing; she’s clearly been thinking the same.

“They probably were,” Clarke shrugs. She’s got her bow and arrows here and ready to go, but what would be the point in trying to prove them wrong? They can think whatever they want about her. They’ve probably made up their minds either way.

She looks over at Bellamy, expecting to have seen a change but there is nothing.

Roan tosses his head over his shoulder and smiles knowingly.

“Angel, you’re good to be sent out right? No last minute shakes?”

She takes in the rest of the people in the room. They are all so clearly strong, so clearly powerful, but so was she before all of this.

“I wouldn’t be here if there were,” she answers, and she says it loudly, says it without any heaviness in her voice and she says it while she looks at Bellamy, wills him to meet her eye, dares him to do it.

“Thought I should still ask,” he shrugs back easily.

Bellamy drops his head to the floor so she can’t get a read on his face, but it’s not like she could do that before either.

“Okay, so if that’s all sorted-”

“What?” His voice seems to spring back into action with the threat of moving on from this conversation, and Bellamy crosses the wall he’s put up in front of him by taking a step forward. “No,” he says with a finality that makes Clarke’s ears want to bleed. “This isn’t happening.”

“You don’t get to decide that,” Roan shrugs again; happy.

“I am not going to sit and watch you-”

He starts marching forward, ignorant to everyone else scattered around the floor, watching him with a curiosity that you only find on people who are used to seeing violence. There’s no fear between any of them, not even Octavia, there’s just intrigue.

His sister has her head in her hands, trailing her finger around the floor in a clumsy doodle, like she’s waiting for this to be over. Clarke wishes she could look that casual.

Roan stops leaning on the wall but he keeps his arms folded as Bellamy storms up to him.

“Blake you’ll do whatever I tell you to do,” his own voice has dropped a whole octave, and all Clarke can think, is this is the voice of a commander. “I give the orders around here, not you son.”

 _Son._ The absolute cheek of it all. Roan can only be ten years older than Bellamy at most.

They watch each other for a moment, size the other one up and then Bellamy seems to form a new idea and his head snaps to the right of him, still chest to chest with Roan.

“Raven, you don’t think she should be out there either,” he says, almost pleadingly. “I know you don’t.”

Raven takes her time with answering, never once taking her eyes away from Bellamy’s. What must that be like? Clarke wonders. To be met in the eye by the man who did them wrong.

“It’s not up to me,” she says slowly. “I want Clarke to do what she wants. Life is too short to do anything else,”

He doesn’t wait around before he throws his hand to his head, balling a clump of hair into his fist as he looks all around the room for _something_ to back him up. He focuses, only for a second, on a space behind Roan’s head, and then his face settles from where his eyebrows were all furrowed, it relaxes like he’s accepting something.

Clarke hopes that, for a moment, he might just be giving up on fighting this. But that isn’t it.

“Murphy-”

“Don’t even think about trying to talk to me,”

Murphy holds his hand up, palm flat but positioned at an angle to Bellamy and the ground, a warning to not come any further. His shoulders have tensed up next to Clarke’s, and she doesn’t have to look at him to know the disgust all over his face.

And then there is silence for an eternity more, and Clarke knows she should be looking anywhere other than at Bellamy, but he’s still her magnet and she still can’t drag her eyes away.

She’s been angry. Ever since she woke up, she’s been hurt, and numb, and confused, and scared, but the only thing she can remember now is the anger.

How dare he. She doesn’t even recognise this person, flipping around the room desperately. He is a stranger. How dare he act as though he has a claim over how she lives her life now.

And she watches as his gaze, which had been drilling holes into Murphy’s, trickles down like he’s watching a spider crawl across the wall, and it lands on Clarke ever so reluctantly.

She wishes they were different. She wishes she could say that she looks into his eyes and sees nothing, that she sees oblivion. But oblivion has never belonged in his eyes and it never will. No, they are still everything to her. They are still dripping in honey and warmth.

She loses her breath, pathetically, when he looks into her eyes. And she doesn’t care how long eternity lasts because this, this softness that she can see, this gives her hope that he isn’t gone.

And she knows, Clarke _knows_ , that he is feeling something too. His whole body relaxes, so subtly that no one would see it if they didn’t know him as well as she does, but it does. He releases everything he’d been holding tight in his bones and he looks into Clarke’s eyes as though he’s seeing her for the first time.

They used to have a chord between them and she thought it had snapped but it’s still as thick as rope, still as heavy as steel, still as strong as gold. They were meant to have forever, well, he’s got forever in his eyes and Clarke can see it burning in through him.

But she’s angry.

Sound doesn’t even leave his mouth. Maybe it reached his throat but it gets lost there because when he says her name, he says it with silence.

No one hears him say her name but Clarke can read it on his lips, just a subtle twitch of them and he’s begging for her to listen to him. He’s turning her name into ‘please’. He’s turning her name into ‘stay’.

And she hears ‘stay’ and she hates it. How can he expect her to _stay_ when he gave up on her? When he was the one to run away.

Her voice isn’t broken like his is. She hasn’t used it and that’s because she wouldn’t let herself, but his has gone and hers hasn’t. So when she answers his request, she doesn’t choke.

“Don’t you dare,”

Clarke doesn’t think she’s ever sounded so cold. She’s never had so much venom in her voice and it fires like ice, and freezes up everything inside her, and she hates the taste of that venom.

There is still an infinity streaming between the two of them but what is it worth now?

When he breaks away and spins on his heels, Clarke sucks in a breath deeply through her mouth and Murphy looks around to make sure she’s okay.

“This is insanity,” Bellamy thunders, his voice wet. It wasn’t wet before now. “I’m not going to stand around to see this happen again,”

He storms out of the room, feet like gunfire against the tiles, and Echo stands too to meet him but she might as well be invisible right now.

“Blake,” Roan calls, impatient and sounding ever more like their leader.

He gets ignored.

“Let him go,” Clarke says, feeling the blankness take over her face, feeling the cold sweep over her as she announces it. “Let him run away,”

When he slams the door shut behind him, so hard that the plaster cracks, actually cracks and ripples around it- and Echo is left on this side of it because he didn’t realise she was trying to follow- Clarke understands that she needs to take her own advice.

She needs to let him go.

Having the door pulled between you and your… whatever Bellamy and Echo are to each other, mustn’t feel great, and Clarke watches Echo huff loudly when she wrenches it back open and follows the trail of dust that he left behind.

A few moments of stunned silence are all it takes for someone else to speak up.

“Okay,” Nyko says, head leaning back against the wall and eyes trained to the ceiling. “This doesn’t need to be a week-long discussion. If Roan says she’s okay to fight, and Clarke says she’s okay to fight, then it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks.”

Octavia has moved to keep her whole face in her hands, holding it up with shaking arms, and she must be so uncertain about everything around them.

“Welcome to the Ark, Griffin,” she thinks that’s Gaia.

Murphy claps her on the shoulder, a smug smile on his face, as a few more people chirp up. But this doesn’t feel like a success.

 

…

 

Clarke gets given guard duty. All of that, for guard duty.

Fifty hours of it over the next four days.

Wells and Raven are leaving tomorrow for a food recovery. They’re going to scour some old food factories that haven’t been touched yet, by them at least. Roan says they’ll be gone for five days maximum, but he’s going too and that leaves a sense of uneasiness in the pit of Clarke’s stomach.

At least he isn’t taking Murphy along as well. She can just annoy him for the time being. Octavia is going tomorrow too, and Bryan and Gaia. It seems like teams of six are the magic number.

Apparently ‘guard duty’ involves a lot of standing on the inside of the gates, watching for any sort of breach, or perhaps the entrance to the building which is about a hundred feet away from the surrounding wall.

She’s excited to get outside again. She’s not looking forward to being on her feet for eleven hours at a time.

But it’s what Clarke signed up to and so she’ll have to suck it up. She understands why she hasn’t been chosen to go out on the rekkie; she’s still only just been discharged from the hospital, and she isn’t a sure thing yet.

Roan doesn’t know that she might not ever be a sure thing again, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Nobody, as usual, mentions Bellamy. And Echo doesn’t come back.

Clarke dreams that night, for the first time, of hands on her body that aren’t threatening. That don’t offer pressure like all the other touches she’s been given do. She feels arms around her back that shield and protect. She feels lips on her neck that make her feel warmth that she hasn’t felt in such a long time.

This is the worst dream. Because she also feels those sensations leave as quickly as they arose, and she dreams Bellamy leaving her for the hundredth time.

She wakes up the same way she always does. An outline of her own sweat on her mattress and pillow, teeth that feel like they’re about to fall out, and voice hoarse from her pleading for him to come back.

She still hasn’t cried. Not since the day she woke up. There is probably something wrong with her head but it’s not fixable.

It might be a good thing that Wells is leaving tomorrow; it gives him less time to grill her about the hole she made in his wall. He might have even forgotten about it by the time he gets back.

A girl can hope with whatever scraps of hope she might still have.

 

…

 

It’s not like Clarke actually gets any sleep through the rest of the night. She lies awake, watching the way Raven’s weight shifts in her sleep by the creaking of her mattress above.

The knock at the door comes at five in the morning, when rosy light would be starting to stream through the room if this were a college dorm. Clarke gets out from under her sweat-soaked blanket and toes on her sneakers just in case this is an emergency.

There are very few reasons as to why someone would knock on their door at five o’clock in the morning.

It’s Octavia, wearing a sweater that stretches past the baggy shorts she must have been wearing while she slept. Her hair is braided back and Clarke recognises that braid: it’s the one she wore in Nebraska, and during the time where she was ill in their cottage.

It’s her battle costume.

“Hi,” she croaks out, having just woken up.

“Hey,”

Clarke moves to cross the sides of the hoodie she’s just thrown on over her body. She slips out through the small crack she’s allowed the door to open and closes it softly behind her so as not to wake Raven.

“Were you asleep?”

Clarke doesn’t understand why she asks that; it’s not exactly relevant. She’s clearly not asleep now, so that’s all that matters.

“No,” she answers, arms gripping to opposite sides of her body. “Did you need something?”

“I came to talk to you. We’re leaving in a few hours and I wanted to catch you before I go,”

Octavia knows that this is a risk.

Clarke hesitates for a moment, knowing exactly where her loyalties lie. Octavia and Raven have both hurt each other immeasurably and Clarke is more than caught up in the middle of it all. _Raven_ was the one who stayed with her when she was weak.

“It’ll only take a couple of minutes,” Octavia hastens to assure her, as though the thought of crawling back into that stone cold mattress is in any way inviting.

“Where do you want to go?”

“Oh,” maybe she hadn’t thought this far ahead. “The rec room should be empty.”

Clarke gestures for her to lead the way, knowing exactly what Octavia has come to talk about but at the same time knowing nothing.

Whatever it is, neither of them are going to have any easy answers. There’s no such thing as an easy answer anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'It's in the eyes, I can tell you will always be danger,'  
> \- Snake Eyes, Mumford and Sons


	28. Now all your love is wasted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to thank everyone for voting me into the modern WIP and angst WIP (and up and coming author) for BFWA!  
> I was completely shocked, to be honest. I can't picture people actively voting for my fic, but if you are then that's super cool of you.  
> ^^ Articulate, huh?  
> Sorry for the delay in this chapter. The next one is huge, and I love it.  
> Anyway, I've been swooning over your comments as always.  
> Enjoy x

Clarke follows behind Octavia, and they stay silent the whole way through to the rec room. It’s awkward. Neither of them know exactly how deep they’ve cut the other one.

“How’re you doing?” Octavia asks, holding the door open behind her as they step back into the room that they were in only hours ago.

“You gonna ask me that every time you see me?”

“No,”

Clarke slumps down on to a stack of mats reaching up to her knees and doesn’t lean back against the wall. Octavia hops up on to the counter, far enough away that they’ll have to raise their voices.

“Octavia-”

“I’m sorry about Bellamy,” she shrugs, rushing, trying to get it over with as quickly as she can. “He was out of order today.”

“He was,”

Quiet. Clarke can hear her watch ticking, even if it is only digital. Octavia is playing with her hands; Clarke doesn’t know what to do with hers.

“You know why he was saying all of that though, right?”

“If you’re going to try to talk me out of joining-”

“Clarke,” she cuts her off again. “You know me. That’s not something I would do,”

“Well, it’s not like guard duty is exactly going to kill me off. I’ve lived through worse,”

It’s a lame attempt at humor, and it doesn’t even reach her lips when she tries to smirk.

Octavia doesn’t say anything.

“Too soon?” Clarke asks, cautious. They never had to be cautious around each other before.

“Maybe a little,”

She’s too tired for this.

“So they’re letting you fight?”

“Huh?”

Octavia pushes off the table, which, of course she does. She never could sit still.

“You’re training, right?”

“Uh yeah,” she says, foot sweeping against the tiles. “Ark has been the best thing that could have happened to me,” a pause, she’s hesitating to say something. “I’ve met someone too, just, if it matters.”

Clarke looks up at that, not sure what to feel but shock.

“You have?”

The brunette rushes forward, landing down next to Clarke, enough space for another person to squeeze in between the two of them. She’s trying to hide the smile on her face, but Clarke doesn’t want her to have to do that.

Just because she’s not happy doesn’t mean everyone else can’t be.

“You met him too,” she says shyly. “It’s Lincoln.”

Of course it is. That man is practically a walking thyroid. Of course the man that Octavia chooses is going to be a real life Terminator.

“He’s a little old for you,” Clarke says, finding her smirk.

She thinks, only for a moment, about what Bellamy’s reaction might be to all of this, if he even knows. He definitely won’t have taken the news well.

“He’s something special. He was one of the ones who found us at the hospital. He’s been with me, through everything,”

She’s talking as though she’s fighting Lincoln’s cause, like she’s looking for Clarke’s approval. It feels strange.

“Everything?”

Octavia nods her head again and for the first time since they’ve known each other, Clarke could swear that she might be blushing in these harsh lights.

“I don’t know if you remember what we spoke about the day you…”

“I remember,” Clarke tries, not too sure about which part of it that Octavia is referring to. It might have all just become one big blur.

“Well you were right. About it all. That’s why I’m not mad at you for breaking his heart. You were right about love. It’s not just life and death; it’s nothing like that.” She says slowly.

The memory trickles back in quietly, sneaking up behind her with a pointed finger tapping patiently at her shoulder.

_“It sucks that that’s what love is now,” Raven sighs, and Clarke can’t stop herself from saying, as plain as day:_

_“That is not what love is. Not at all,” because it isn’t, and it’ll never be all love is. She realized she’d die for Bellamy so so long ago, she’d die for any of them. Love is more than that._

“You’re in love with Lincoln?”

“Yeah. Yeah I am.”

Maybe _that_ is what love should be now. Just, certain. Something to rely on through everything else.

“So you know how you love again?” Clarke asks, thinking back to how unsure Octavia had been about that on the day she died. She sounds proud.

“I do,” Octavia admits, without an ounce of shame. “And I think I’m pretty damn good at it.”

Maybe she hasn’t had this. It might be ever so slightly insensitive, considering the circumstances, but without Raven, Clarke would guess that this is the first conversation she has actually had about Lincoln in this way. The first time she can actually gush about him how she wants to.

Clarke hasn’t seen her spend time with anyone other than him, or Bellamy on a rare occasion, and the really sad thing is, even though Clarke was the one who got abandoned, she is not as lonely as the Blakes are.

Octavia has already told her that she never had ‘girlfriends’ in the life before this, and she certainly doesn’t have them now. Even if she hasn’t been forgiven, maybe she should still have this. This scarcity of companionship, of friendship.

“Tell me about him,” Clarke says, not a question. And she doesn’t say it just because she’s interested in hearing about the guy who has so blatantly stolen Octavia’s heart. She says it because she was their leader once upon a time, and this is her responsibility.

She has a _responsibility_ to make sure the people that she committed to are still safe and in a place that they want to be. She’ll offer indulgence, not because she owes anything at all to the girl next to her, but because this is what she is made of.

And Octavia does tell her about him. Clarke learns that he isn’t just a six foot five hunk of muscle who holds himself so strongly in that military hold that it’s pretty clear where he came from before all of this. It turns out, he’s an artist and unlike Clarke, who gave up on that when it became clear that hobbies could never be important to her again, still keeps at it.

Clarke learns that Octavia knew he was ‘the one’ when she almost tore his door of the hinges in a fit of grief during the first few weeks, and then proceeded to try to sleep with him moments after. He talked her down, told her he wouldn’t take advantage of her like that, and then made her sleep in his bed while he crashed on the floor. Held her until she was done crying herself to sleep before he left.

Octavia Blake crying must be something strange to see, but Clarke knows that she never will. It’s something she will keep between her and Lincoln. It’s a level of trust that Clarke doesn’t want to hold the weight of.

She hears stories until the alarm on her watch alerts them to the fact that it’s half past six, and that Octavia will be leaving soon.

Another silence enraptures them, now that they’ve been drawn out of the bubble again. They’ve been brought back into the reality of what they are supposed to be to each other now.

Octavia clears her throat, hoarse from talking so enthusiastically, and says what she says with clarity that she’ll never truly lose.

“You haven’t mentioned Raven yet,”

So she knows.

“I’m pretty sure you know what I think about it all,” Clarke shrugs, glancing back to her hands which are clasped between knees that are being leant on by her elbows.

Clarke can’t open up to Octavia in the way that she can with Raven. There is a loyalty there.

“Try me?” Octavia asks, chewing on her lip.

She sighs before she answers, hating every moment she has to think about this shitty situation.

“She hurt you because she chose me over helping you grieve,” she states as though reading through a manual. She’ll keep it simple because forgiveness between the two of them has always felt an awful lot like a business contract: to the point, lacking in naivety, and over within the next few minutes. “You hurt her because you chose grief over me and helping her through what I did. Oh, and your brother. You chose your brother over me too. And you haven’t so much as tried to talk to each other about it.”

She says it void of emotion.

“That’s not what you think,” Octavia reminds her, smiling sadly. “You’re just stating facts.”

Is that not how they do this though?

“You want to know what I think?” Clarke sighs back, tiredness taking over the rigid poise of her spine. Octavia nods shallowly. “I think this is all a little too complicated for me.”

That gets considered for a few moments and Octavia is looking at the same spot on the floor that Clarke is looking at when she answers.

“She doesn’t know what it was like,”

“Are you kidding me?” Clarke doesn’t mean to sound angry, but she doesn’t regret it either. “She had to watch me die.”

And Octavia is still just shaking her head, small movements that are so subtle that maybe she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.

“She got to be with you. And then she got to see you live. It’s different, Clarke,”

She knows that Octavia isn’t trying to be accusatory with what she voices, but it’s a byproduct of the words that she’s chosen. It makes it sound like, if her and Raven were to actually understand one another, then Clarke should have died for good.

“Well I’m sorry about that,” she says sarcastically, scoffing a little. There’s not enough sarcasm there for it to be genuine snark and Clarke knows the exact reason for that.

Everything _would_ have been easier if she’d just died.

Octavia doesn’t say anything, just keeps biting her lip because she knows that she shouldn’t have said that.

“Why is he still pretending that he cares about me?” Clarke asks when the clock reads six-forty-five. She’s been wondering it all night; she might as well ask about it while they’re trying to air their dirty laundry. “All of that,” she gestures over to the doorway, hoping to make it clear what she’s referring to. “What was the point in any of it?”

If Bellamy really doesn’t care, really doesn’t want to know her anymore, he wouldn’t be fighting to keep her grounded like this. He wouldn’t be acting like it is physically painful to see her ready to risk her life again.

“He’s not pretending, Clarke. He does still care,” Octavia says as though it’s obvious.

“Sure,” she snorts back. “Forgive me for not believing a word of that.”

“Clarke, you broke his heart,”

And there’s no accusation this time, at least not in what Octavia decides to put out there. Every shred of blame that Clarke hears comes from her own guilt.

“But I didn’t choose to do that,” she tries to reason.

“And I’m not holding that against you,”

It’s the younger girl’s turn to sound diplomatic, like she’s unimpressed by everything they’re saying. It digs up the anger inside Clarke.

“What do you want then?” she bites, and she’ll be annoyed at herself later for not keeping her calm, but for now, “What do you two actually want from me?”

Because she’s got nothing left to give.

Octavia shrugs, casual.

“I think we both want you to live. Me and Bellamy just have different ideas of what that means now,”

“You’ve forgiven me? For what I did to him?”

“Like you said, you didn’t choose to do it,”

A pause. Long enough for Clarke to stand up, because they really don’t have time for this anymore.

“Are you gonna forgive me?” Octavia asks, still sat in the same place and making no move to get up from where she is.

Clarke will go then. She’ll be the one to walk away.

Octavia doesn’t ask it with shame, or with guilt. She’s just curious.

“You made a choice,”

Clarke knows that she can’t do that yet. No matter how much she wants to, because she _does_ want to, there’s still something that needs to happen first.

“Find Raven,” she says, then heads for the door, turning her back on the girl behind her. “Fix things,” thinking back to what Raven had said, outside Wells and Murphy’s room, she decides to add, “Be brave,”

It’s a simple set of instructions. Simple.

When she’s got her hand on the push handle of the door, the same one that Bellamy swung at like he was hanging from a vine, she tosses her head over her shoulder.

“And O?”

The nickname doesn’t feel wrong like she thought it might.

“Yeah?” Octavia asks, thinking, too caught up in her own mind to focus her vision on to Clarke, no matter how much she tries to make it look like she’s looking at her.

“Stay alive.”

 

…

 

Stepping outside for the first time, on solid ground and not just the abandoned roof of her enclosure, Clarke expects to have to figure out how to adjust to the strength of the wind, or to the rigidity of concrete beneath her feet, but she doesn’t have to take that time out.

Her feet recognize solid ground as though they never left it. Her body responds to the blistering heat of the sun as though it never went away.

She remembers how natural it is to be outside in the way an insomniac remembers sleep after finally getting a night of rest. It is a wake up call to where she should be and reminds her of how wrong the new routine feels now.

The laces sewn across her boots hold every other bit of her together like they are part of a corset drawn over her chest. Wounded, stitched clumsily back together like superglued china shards, she heads towards the gates of the base.

It’s a sufficient walk to get to them- a drawbridge crossing- and when she settles in at the slither of space that allows a shooter to aim their sight through, Clarke loads her bow.

There is a fence in front of this wall, protecting the gap. There is more silence than she had expected. No walkers that she can see but it’s not like they’re greyhounds. They can’t sniff out blood from miles away. They are thick and simple. They see meat, they see life, and they’ll pounce.

Niylah is sharing her shift with Clarke today, a hundred yards down the wall and looking a lot more focused than Clarke is.

She wonders how many threats they’ve had to the integrity of this place, how many close calls it has taken to get this secure.

“How you doin’ newbie?”

Clarke looks away from the line of her arrow for a moment, just to check that Niylah isn’t talking to anyone else. They are the only two out here.

She shifts her shoulders, rubs her ear against them to wipe away the sweat starting to gather.

“Well I haven’t been eaten yet,” she shrugs.

“Good. That’s good,”

 

…

 

Three days pass and Clarke meets with her mother again, catching her as she’s leaving a shift at the hospital ward. It’s brief and gives them no time to get into anything too complicated as Clarke walks her back up to the Commanders’ floor.

They discuss their taxing schedules. Clarke gets lectured on staying healthy, on eating as much as she should be eating, on making sure she isn’t pushing herself too hard. It’s not tense but it’s not familial; it probably won’t ever be. They have missed their chance to be familial and they both know it.

They say goodbye and Clarke doesn’t hug her, because touch is sacred now. With skin as sensitive as a live wire, she won’t take the risk unless she absolutely has to. Live wires are dangerous; they hurt people.

She doesn’t want her touch to hurt anyone. She’s already hurt them enough.

She’s managed to avoid the mess hall during the busy times- the times where Cage is always there- even if it is at the cost of a few meals. Well, more than a few. She survived out there living on bare minimum though, it’s not like she’s going to starve.

Wells and Raven aren’t here to lecture her, and Murphy knows better than to try and tell her what to do.

The nights are hard work, and with Raven absent from the top bunk, the room feels much too big. Clarke spends as little time as possible in there- it’s slowly becoming one of her least favorite places in the whole building. Her bed has grown in size, the nightmares seeping out from under her pillow like an infection, covering the floor with their venom.

Bellamy doesn’t magically appear, but Clarke lost any hope of that happening a long time ago. She’s thought, in those ten hour shifts, about what his desperation for her not to be a part of the Ark might mean.

She’s nailed it down to two alternatives: either he really, truly, can’t stand to be anywhere near her anymore, and is just disgusted by the thought of having to work in the same space. Or he is feeling guilty for the way he has acted and is trying to make himself feel better by pretending this is how to keep her safe.

Both make Clarke feel sick to her stomach, and both make something run fire through her veins that she can’t name.

Nobody talks to her about Bellamy. They’ve all seen enough- between his fight with Wells, his fight with Murphy, his abrasiveness at the team meeting- to know that the subject isn’t one that should be approached if they can help it.

Clarke does what she’s always been good at doing; pushing it all away to the back of her mind.

The nights have been a challenge and so she’s had to come up with a game of sorts in order to keep her brain active. It stops her from falling asleep. When she falls asleep the control is gone, the power she has over her own consciousness fades and instead, the zombies get to leech it away.

She tests herself, each time she wakes up shivering, to remember the times where she’s been happy. Because all of that is another lifetime away from where she is now and if she doesn’t try to recount it to herself then she’ll lose it.

She’s already lost so much of him; she won’t lose the memories as well.

The her that lives in those moments of happiness aren’t Clarke anymore though. It’s like watching something in a movie theatre. She’s watching two actors, listening to dialogue that should be warm enough to make you feel something, but in truth she’s forgotten how he used to laugh. She’s forgotten how easy it was just to sidle up next to each other and lean against the wall of trust, and faith and love.

She’s forgotten all of the love that existed between the two of them because if it was this easy to let go of, for him, then it was never really love at all.

Bellamy Blake drew her in, he made love to her with his words and then he left her out to dry when he himself got wounded.

Clarke sometimes wonders if, had he come and found her on the day she’d woken up, they’d be able to recover what they had before this. She tries to work out what exactly ruined her.

It wasn’t him leaving because she could have forgiven that. She did, after all, tell him that he should move on. It’s not even the matter of him not coming to see her in the med bay, because it’s been four months.

That’s how long they had together and look how much happened in that space of time. She changed completely. She opened up and she let herself understand what it truly meant to do more than just survive and so if he’s changed in these four months then she could have forgiven him for that too.

No, what she’s really hurt by, is the complete lack of recognition of what they had. Because they were more than just two people who had a mutual attraction to the other one; they had a reliance that is _rare_.

If he doesn’t want her in the way he did before then she can accept that, but to forget how well they worked together, how good they made each other feel, isn’t fair.

It’s almost as though he doesn’t want to feel good.

Maybe that’s just it. Maybe Bellamy doesn’t want something _good_ in his life anymore.

He doesn’t want to be happy, and he’s lost his drive, Clarke remembers Octavia saying. She tries to imagine what this time has been like for him, but all she sees is the cold, hard bite of his jaw when he fought to call her weak. All she sees is the slender, menacing brunette who could probably snap Clarke in half right about now, and she thinks of nonexistent space between the two of their bodies.

But it’s what she said. She told him to move on, to find someone. He’s just sticking to her request. She can’t expect him to come running just because she didn’t stay dead and she doesn’t; she just wants a damn explanation.

And at the same time she wants absolutely nothing at all to do with him. And that part, the colder, the angry part, wins.

She’ll be as civil as she can be. Bellamy Blake is a stranger, and she’ll just have to treat him like one.

 

…

 

Clarke walks outside, three days into Raven and Wells being gone, fully prepared for a twelve-hour watch shift and not at all falling asleep on her feet.

She hasn’t seen a walker yet. She doesn’t really know where they’ve all gone but they will be somewhere. They are always somewhere.

Niylah was pleasant enough, considering the circumstances. She made polite conversation through the eight hours of which their shift lined up and it left Clarke feeling disappointed to be alone once she left.

The day after that, she was partnered with Jackson for four hours and then Sterling for seven. Both of them were easy, neither of them tried too hard to talk to her either because they knew she didn’t care to or because they weren’t bothered.

They could probably see that she’s broken. They knew that getting themselves involved with any of the fucked up shit in her head is too much hassle for what it is worth.

But she got lucky with the people that fell into her schedule, because none of them knew her. She didn’t have to worry about keeping up with everything that has happened because none of them would ask about it.

She doesn’t get paired with a stranger today. She doesn’t get that lucky again. And Clarke sees that as she walks towards her viewpoint, and notices him already stood, poised and held upright, facing the space outside these walls.

Maybe if she’s quiet enough, and she doesn’t make any obvious movements, Bellamy won’t even notice her. They could just stay like this for however long and not acknowledge each other.

Clarke doesn’t linger her gaze on him for longer than she dares to risk- she’s not as brave as she used to be- just long enough to take in the gun he’s aiming, and the black t-shirt that curves over his shoulders like a tight shell.

She sets her expression, pursing her lips as she settles into her own space, far enough away from him where she’ll have to shout if she needs to speak to him. She won’t need to speak to him for anything.

Her bow is loaded and there is nothing left to do but wait.

Bellamy makes no move to let her know that he knows that she’s here. His shoulders are still as tense as ever and Clarke resolutely stares forward.

The world has never been so loud as it is now. A volcano could be erupting just a mile away and the silence between the two of them would drown it out. And it lasts for hours; long enough that Clarke thinks he really might not have even seen her.

They are quiet past sundown, and when night comes so do the chills. Her teeth start chattering even in the summer dusk and she hopes they’re not loud enough for him to hear. It is a weakness after all. She is weak. And she can’t let him see that.

Gunfire shatters the wall that they’ve built up between the two of them and, four hours into her watch, Clarke whips her head to the side. She hasn’t heard that noise in so long, not since they were in that damned hospital, and it is shock.

That’s all it is.

He has gone back to neutrality in the time it takes Clarke to look over, because that is what he does apparently. He recovers quicker than anyone would expect.

It takes too long for Clarke to realize that, if he has started shooting, then there’s going to be something that they actually have to shoot at and so she tears her sights away from his rigid profile to search for a target.

This is her job- she should probably start doing it.

There are five more of them, approaching the wall with a haste that is more curious than anything. She’s seen so few walkers that aren’t hunting or eating that it seems strange to see them walking so listlessly.

They are still grotesque, and they are still easily the crux of her nightmares, but they have this vulnerability about them when they’re without aim. Lonely, almost. Wanderers.

They are picking at the corpse of one of them, searching it confusedly.

Bellamy shoots again and another one goes down, and another and another and another. Clarke fires her bow before she misses the opportunity to do so and she strikes the last walker in its right eye.

She knocks that down to the proximity, because that one was the closest to her. It was luck, not accuracy.

Once she’s reloaded her bow, with another arrow that she will inevitably lose, she catches him in her peripheral vision. It’s a flicker, barely anything, but he turned to look at her for a second and Clarke has that information without his permission.

It’s like school kids on opposite sides of a classroom, watching each other until they realize that the other one is doing the same thing. It’s nervous and naïve. It’s unsure, like so much is now. They don’t even know how to act around one another.

All of that easiness has gone.

Clarke shivers, her bare shoulders trembling from the cold. She’s glad she’s got her back to him, with the way she has to hold herself with her bow, because now at least he doesn’t have to see the knife twisting in her gut.

It takes about twenty minutes for anything else to happen, enough time for the spotlights that give them some semblance of light in patches along the outskirts of the wall to flicker on.

Clarke is half in the light, and half out of it. She doesn’t bother to look at him and she practically jumps out of her skin when he speaks.

“Don’t waste your arrows,”

The words, when they reach Clarke’s ears, sound chewed and regurgitated, like he’s been stewing on whether they should actually leave his mouth. Well, it’s taken twenty minutes since she shot so that probably gave him enough time to digest them himself.

He’s worked out a way to say as little as possible while still getting his point across, his voice raised only from necessity. He doesn’t sound approachable and there is nothing like recognition in his voice. It’s just cold.

Clarke takes her time trying to figure out whether or not she should answer him. If she doesn’t, then she’ll be admitting to him the power that he’s got over her tongue. She decides she will because that is what she would do with any other stranger.

“It’s not a waste,” she says simply, stepping out of the light a little to widen the gap between them.

Does Bellamy even know what waste is anymore? Doesn’t he understand what he has wasted?

“This isn’t an audition,” he calls, gruff. “It’s not like you have to prove yourself or anything.”

“Last time I checked, this is my job. Just as much as it is yours,”

She’s losing patience steadily, fighting the urge to turn around just to see if he’s giving anything away. It’s not like she doesn’t already know the answer.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Bellamy says after a while, voice quiet enough that it almost breezes past Clarke silently. She catches it; she hears a frustration.

No. If they’re going to be forced into each other’s company for hours at a time then they are going to learn to do it with civility. He isn’t allowed to say things like that and still go on as though they’ve never said anything at all.

Clarke shoves the arrow in her hand back behind her into the quiver strung on one strap over her shoulder and spins on her heels, lets the wind pick up her hair as she marches over to him.

He at least has the decency to look away from the sight of his gun when she approaches. At least he’s given up on pretending she doesn’t exist.

He regains that same tired expression. It’s like Clarke being anywhere near him makes him physically exhausted. He looks at her through hooded eyes with that same flickering gaze, crawling all over her face and taking in every detail. Maybe he thinks that if he learns her enough, he’ll know how to win this.

With them both looking away from the area outside, this is a risk, but this was going to be a risk wherever. She can taste that in the air as it becomes flooded with that same heaviness, that same tension that encompasses them completely.

In the short amount of time it takes Clarke to storm over to him, she loses her breath. She doesn’t spend too long trying to figure out why that is: it might be how the night has chosen to take things from her. It might be a consequence of the delicacy that has enraptured her body. And it might just be Bellamy. He’s taken everything else from her, why not her breath too?

There isn’t a single part of Clarke that is touching him. There is space between the two of them for another person to squeeze through easily.

“Go on then-” Bellamy. She won’t say his name to him. A stranger wouldn’t know it. She speaks calmly, controlled and slow, voice level with everything she’s feeling clawed to the back of her throat. “Tell me where you think I should be,”

He watches her for a few seconds, still with curiosity that maybe wasn’t there before any of this happened. His eyes are narrowed like he’s waiting for her to snap and when he answers Clarke, he’s caught the knack of fake nonchalance.

“You should be healing,” he says simply, a shrug held back by the hard set of his shoulders.

She wants to scoff, to laugh in his face, but she’s not going to lose her cool now. She’s not going to bite on to that buzzing chord already stringing back up between the two of them.

“This,” she starts but has to close her eyes to make sure she’s still got her composure. When she reopens them, Bellamy is still looking at her with neutral uncertainty all over his face. “This is how I heal.”

Physically? Sure she’s got a point. But that’s what they’re talking about right?

“Now, I am tired of you making me feel complacent,” Clarke says, even slower than before so that she can be sure to catch each word as it falls if she needs to.

Bellamy’s reaction is instantaneous.

In the same way that his body froze up in the second he heard her say his name for the first and only time, outside of the gym while he was sobbing distraughtly into the crook of his arm, his face tears itself up in this one.

He narrows his eyes even further, wrinkles the space between his eyebrows, scrunches his nose up and shrugs the boss of his chin like he’s got something sour in his mouth.

“Complacent!?” he practically spits. Maybe he would be spitting it if they were closer together. He says it like a demand, like it’s a curse.

Clarke storms forward. She _has_ to.

“Like a liability-”

“That’s not what-”

“It’s not fair to-”

“I never said that you-”

“Well you didn’t have to,” she snaps, cutting him off. “You didn’t have to say anything. I got the message loud and clear,”

His outrage falters for a moment as her words settle into the stilted fabric of the blanket surrounding them. Those words are, after all, an iceberg. The majority of what she means behind them is hidden, waiting for him beneath that veil of difference.

“Clarke,” he says, quiet again, restrained. Him saying her name, though, only pisses her off more.

“I will _not_ be complacent,”

And she turns on the heels of her new boots again, because looking at his face, how she might just be imagining the way it has softened thanks to all of the darkness they’re being held by, hurts. She thinks she’s said all that she needs to say until she’s taken a step forward and then learns something.

He isn’t a stranger. Bellamy can’t ever be a stranger to her. That’d be too kind. No, after all of this, he could never be just that. Clarke fights with herself on whether or not that strip of information should be solidified between the two of them, but she remembers the repercussions of holding back from him when it mattered. She won’t let herself do that again.

“You will not make me complacent,” she adds in her halted path, her head turning but not so much as to brush past her shoulder, not enough to look anywhere near him. She laces the words with all of the venom that exists on her tongue and freezes them over before they reach his ears.

And there it is. There is the acknowledgement of how much he has done to sever everything that existed between them. She’s done with being passive and she’s tired of pretending to be apathetic towards this.

He can know how much he fucked up.

Six months ago, if they were having this argument, Clarke would take this as a cue to leave. She’d walk away with her bow in her fist, and she’d tell herself that he could handle the watch on his own. That it’d be good for them to simmer independently.

But she is not the person she was six months ago, and she has a responsibility to uphold. So as much as her body is crying out to get as far away from Bellamy as she can possibly get, Clarke doesn’t run away.

She paces forward to her watch post and faces the wall, the pitch inky expanse of nothing and waits for it to become something, all the while ignoring the man on her right because this is her job and she is going to do it.

 

…

 

After her shift, when the sun is just starting to rise and she has left Bellamy still watching the other side of the wall like he’s never going to leave it, Clarke goes to Murphy’s room.

She can’t be alone, and she trusts him. They have earned one another’s trust.

He raises his eyebrow when his door swings open- it’s five in the morning so he’s clearly not expecting company- but something takes over his face when he sees Clarke’s. It’s like she’s got Bellamy’s name written all over it.

He gestures for her to come in and they sit on top of his mattress, in the same way they were a few days ago, only this time, Clarke reaches for the first touch she’s actually wanted in weeks. She leans her head on to his shoulder awkwardly and he doesn’t tense up or shift away.

Murphy’s shoulder is bony and uncomfortable, and his neck is too long in comparison to the lean of her head but it’s going to have to be enough.

They bicker about things that don’t matter in the sparse moments where they aren’t just content with silence; like whether sour patch kids were overrated or not.

Neither of his hands shift from where they are folded in his lap, his legs hanging over the side of the bed while hers are bent up to her chest.

Clarke doesn’t ask for reassurance or any more forgiveness, not just because he wouldn’t know how to give it, but because she doesn’t want it.

She’ll have forgotten this moment in a few months. It’s one of those that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

She knows why he is the only one that she can bare to touch; it’s because she isn’t afraid to hurt him. Live wires are nothing in comparison to the hurt Murphy has had. Everyone else still have things that they can’t bear to lose but he already lost his. Not only that, but he still blames himself for her death. Clarke’s touch will spark no match to hurt like that.

And he knows that that is why she needs him.

It reaches seven-forty when Murphy tells her something that she never expected to hear. He starts to tell her about his past; the time before the apocalypse and it’s more than just what he thought of iconic candies and T.V. shows he’d watch after school.

“I was actually a normal kid up until I was eight, you know,” he smirks. “I thought I’d be a pilot and we had a bulldog called Brandy. Parents were the kind you see in those sitcoms, the stay together forever kind of couple, and me and that damn dog were inseparable.”

He speaks quietly, almost like he’s shocked that he’s even letting any of this slip. Clarke stays silent, knows she’s on the edge of something.

“People aren’t just born as fatalistic as I am. We grow into the shoes the universe makes for us.”

“What happened?” she can’t help but ask, watching the way the opposite wall stays blank and waiting for his story.

“I got sick, like really sick but we couldn’t afford it. Dad was a nurse and he stole me some drugs, but they were heavy shit and of course they found out,” he says resignedly, through a sigh. “Even if he wasn’t gonna be sent to jail, he still lost his job, lost his credibility. We lived in a small town and he wouldn’t have gotten much of a career with the reputation he had after that. He spiraled in the space of a few weeks and by the time he got prosecuted, he was gone. We visited as often as we could, but it was like looking at a ghost. He killed himself a month later and Mom… she never really got over the fact that it was my fault. She grew to hate me. When the only person you have left resents you and the whole reason you’re still alive, you sort of learn to understand that. You take that and mold it into your own kind of hate. Brandy died a few years later and Mom kicked me out and I never went back there,”

“John was my father’s name,” he says, voice still that same drawl as though he isn’t baring his soul. “But it isn’t mine.”

So he _has_ technically got a first name. Clarke can understand why he doesn’t want it.

 _Love is a weakness_ , Clarke thinks. He learnt that from the love between his father and his mother; how it morphed them all into husks of what they used to be, how it transformed into something bitter and toxic.

 “I’ve always been living on borrowed time. My life has always been on someone else’s shoulders; I’m selfish enough to admit that. And I’ve met two people, just two in this entire world, who haven’t even thought about treating that like it’s a burden.”

“Who’s the other one?”

Clarke knows, with the reverence with which he holds to the girl that he fell in love with that Emori is one of those people.

“I wouldn’t be telling _you_ any of this shit if it were anyone else,” he smirks again, rolling his eyes. Not fondly, just a movement.

Clarke sighs and slumps some more on to his shoulder, not really sure what else to do with the labyrinth he has just given her.

“We really are just a pair of cockroaches, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, Griffin. That’s exactly what we are,”

 

…

 

Clarke wakes up to an empty room at nine o’clock in the morning, briefly aware of how Murphy had told her that he’s got a watch shift starting at nine that’ll take all day. The emptiness of this room doesn’t scare her as much but the hole in the plaster does.

She wriggles down from the top bunk and glides over to a dresser, not too sure if it holds the clothes that belong to Murphy or to Wells. It doesn’t really matter anyway. She’s cold and she’s slipped into one of those moods that have started to become a regular occurrence: when her shoulders feel like they’re crawling in ugly scars, when any of her exposed skin feels that way. When the absence of any flesh over her arms and legs makes her feel flimsy and frail.

Clarke hates not being covered up when she gets like this, and there’s no way she’s going to step out into that hall with her arms out. She grabs at a grey hoodie from the top of a drawer and throws it over her head.

It smells like Wells but not too strongly. It’s like the remnants of a hug with him, without any of the hug itself. It is manageable.

She opens the door to their room with her bow slung across her chest and her quiver strap in hand because she’s only got to make her way over to the opposite side of the corridor.

It’s a few steps, if that, and because the universe hates her, she chooses to take them at the same time that Bellamy rounds the corner, looming brunette following just a couple of paces behind him.

It’s too late for him to miss Clarke, if the way that he freezes in the middle of the hall is anything to go by. She’s in their doorway but lingering here is only going to make things worse so Clarke steps out too to face the both of them head on.

This isn’t going to look good. She’s wearing the same clothes that she was wearing last night, with another man’s hoodie wrapped around her chest, bow and arrow in hand which makes it seem like she didn’t go back to her own room. And she didn’t, but not for _that_ reason.

He knows who lives in this room too. Clarke can see Bellamy work that one out as the hard-set, uncomfortable recognition dawns across his face.

She isn’t about to try to explain herself. He is here, with a woman who is looking cautiously between the two of them as she always is when Bellamy and Clarke are in the same room.

Clarke wonders if he knows that Wells has been sent out. He wasn’t there in the meeting to hear it for himself.

They don’t look each other in the eye. She doesn’t know what would be worse to see: hurt in his eyes or nothing at all.

Echo clears her throat in greeting, hostile, and Clarke imagines it translates to something like ‘Shouldn’t you be somewhere else? Scram kid, and let the adults be’.

Clarke notices a lump in Bellamy’s throat bob a little too harshly as he swallows down whatever he might be thinking to say. He might be disgusted.

She stumbles over to her own room, trying her best not to make it look like a walk of shame, and types in the keycode to unlock it. Silence remains until she’s shut the door behind her, and Clarke tears the hoodie off of her body as soon as the latch has clicked.

Jealousy isn’t something she wants from him, or for him. Jealousy is a scar and she’s already got thousands of them.

 

…

 

She’s got the day off today and she should probably sleep considering she’s got a thirteen hour watch shift tonight but realistically, that’s not going to happen.

Clarke goes down to the mess hall, just because it’s something to do, and she relaxes when she catches Jasper and Monty sat at a table a couple rows down from the Ark table.

There are two people at Ark, Miller and Jackson, and they’re talking with hunched shoulders and leaning into each other too much for Clarke to go over and third wheel. Plus, Miller, every time he looks at her, does so with disdain. She’d rather not be around that kind of iciness.

Roan isn’t here to reprimand her for not sitting at Ark and even if he were, Clarke would probably still go over to sit with Jasper and Monty.

They are both wearing easy smiles when she places a plastic mug of tea down on to the surface opposite the two of them, and they welcome her just as easily. They are making conversation with a woman, who looks like she’s in her late thirties with a kid on her lap, half-asleep.

She sees Clarke and offers a tentative smile, polite.

The child, a little boy clutching a single red block of Lego, no bigger than his thumb, perks up as Clarke takes a seat along the bench. A bit like a meerkat in the way he watches her, chin raised and head leaning like he’s waiting for her to do something.

Jasper kicks her shin from under the table then nods over to the boy, fond smirk all over his face.

“This is Doctor Tsing,” he says, stabbing something on his plate with a fork.

Clarke nods over, wearing a grimace.

“You work on the med bay?”

“I do,” she offers, almost like she’s trying to reassure Clarke. She turns down to the boy in her lap then nudges him a little. “You gonna say hi?”

When he realizes he’s drawn the attention of Clarke and the others, the kid squirms and presses his nose into his mother’s neck, the edges of his own turning a red color.

“Sorry,” Tsing laughs. “He’s shy,”

Clarke shakes her head and waves a hand to let her know that she isn’t offended. She turns to the boy before she knows what she’s doing; she never really liked kids before all of this, but each one she sees running through these halls makes her heart hurt in ways she didn’t know it could anymore.

“You know,” she says quietly to the boy, leaning in. “My friend used to play with Lego all the time when we were your age. He built a whole fort out of it once,”

Initially, the kid just squeezes tighter into his mother’s hold but by the time he realizes that Clarke is being nothing but casual, he peers over, curious again.

“A fort?” he asks, nothing more than a whisper.

She nods once she’s taken a sip of her tea- only lukewarm.

“We slept inside it for three nights,”

He grins, all wonky teeth that probably won’t ever get fixed.

“Then we fought because he told me I was taking up too much room and I knocked the whole thing down,” she smirks, making sure to keep her head up because it was a selfish decision that only a child would ever look upon as justified, but she’ll never admit that.

His smile widens and Tsing leans to whisper something in his ear. He gets distracted as he replies and Clarke turns back to the boys opposite her, both of them grinning too.

Jasper asks her how she’s finding the watch shifts and she tells him that they’re freezing but they’re something and then she asks what they’re working on at the moment.

He launches into explaining something overly scientific to do with nutritional genetic modification and Clarke just zones out as he speaks because it’s not something she’ll be able to follow. Monty knows that because smirks when he catches her eyes glazing over.

The kid shuffles down from his mother’s lap and ends up in between her and Clarke, leaning more towards Jasper as though he’s following the project.

“Hi,” he says, quietly to her when Jasper and Monty start debating the pros and cons of a method Clarke has absolutely no idea about.

“Hey,”

“I’m Peter,” he shrugs and he bites his lip like he should be ashamed of his name. He’s got chocolate brown hair that falls past his eyebrows in fluffy ringlets.

“Like Spiderman?”

It doesn’t take long for that cheesy smile to take over again. This kid, with his single block of Lego and a name that he holds tight in a fist, skirts the edges of Clarke like he’s scared to be around her.

“I’m Clarke,” she tells him even though she knows that he already knows who she is.

“Yeah,” his eyebrows pull together as though he’s wondering why she even felt the need to introduce herself. “You’re Superman.”

Clarke clamps her lips together to keep from laughing. He says it like it’s obvious that’s who she is. She’s never heard so much certainty within something so ridiculous. But she started this game so she’ll just have to play along.

“Sure,” she shrugs and looks past his wide eyes- wet orbs that are trained so carefully on her- to his mother. She dips her head, not in shame or to hide away, but as a thank you.

Clarke isn’t sure what she’s being thanked for. If this woman works on the med ward then it’s very likely that at some point, she was taking care of Clarke. Surely it should be the other way around, and she should be thanking her.

She remembers the stories that have been spread about her journey and wonders how much they have twisted her into a marvel.

Jasper lets the kid know that if he had super powers, he’d want it to be x-ray vision. Monty lets him know that that’s a shitty one to hope for and then it turns into another big debate about who the superior superhero is and this time, Peter chips in all he wants.

Tsing asks how Clarke is feeling over his head and Clarke answers that she’ll be better soon enough. She doesn’t mention any of the nightmares, even though there might be something that Tsing could do for them, because they probably all have them now.

She also doesn’t mention her broken heart, because she’s started to accept that that will never be fixed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Now all your love is wasted,'  
> \- Skinny Love, Bon Iver


	29. Guess that I'm a fool for the way that you caught me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this fic (and I) made it into the semi-finals of all of the categories we were nominated for. I don't even know what to say to that.  
> Just thank you to whoever has voted. I'm not expecting it to get any further, considering the titans in the same rounds, but being nominated at all has been humbling.  
> Thank you again! Here's another monster.  
> Em x

Clarke goes to the gym once Jasper and Monty decide they really shouldn’t push the limit of when they should be working, and they scamper off.

She heads back to her room to get changed into something she can work out in. Her eyes catch on some shorts that her and Raven managed to find- they’re a size too small and they are too tight right now. She ignores them and reaches for the sports leggings that actually fit.

The gym is empty- it being midday- and so she heads over to one of the three punching bags that are suspended from the low hanging ceiling and sets her sweater down below the middle one. Sometimes, when she comes in here alone, Clarke realizes how much she misses music. Out there, she never really needed it, but she always used to listen to something when she ran, and it’d be cool to have that now.

Instead, as she starts on the punching bag after a quick warm up, she has to make do with the silence.

Setting about to do a series of drills that mostly just involve jabbing the bag until it swings too violently, Clarke is hyperaware of each smack her fists make to the stiff insides of it. Her hands are tiny and when she watches where they land, they only grow smaller with each punch.

It doesn’t matter. It feels good to work out like this. She wouldn’t do it if anyone else were in here, because she is weak and pathetic when sized up against this kind of opponent, but it’s a chance to take out everything she’s got pent up inside of her.

Noises escape her lips with each hit, involuntary, just from the force with which she is trying to knock the bag. They vary from ugly, enraged grunts to little gasps of air. She’s hyperaware of those sounds too; they’re a good measure of how in control of herself she is.

It lasts half an hour- if that- before the door is swinging open behind her back. Clarke doesn’t look to it, she just rolls her eyes, and is about to move away from this space to the weights area or something. There’s enough time to do so; the person who just walked in takes their time in choosing where they’re going to go, but then someone clears their throat from a few feet behind her and there’s no way she’s going anywhere now.

Clarke hits the bag again, and maybe now that she knows he’s in here too, she pushes more power behind it. Something trickles along one of her knuckles and she feels the skin along them tear.

“This space free?”

She doesn’t turn around to face him. She already knows exactly what he’s doing. He’ll have one hand hanging from his neck and his eyes will be flitting across the ceiling so that he doesn’t have to look at her directly. His voice is hesitant, reluctant and so he’ll probably be biting his lip. She can’t hear him breathing; so he’s holding his breath.

Clarke won’t entertain anything because she hasn’t got the patience for it anymore.

“No,” she bites, her voice shaky from all of the punching.

He’s probably gesturing to the bag adjacent to hers, since the only other ones are on either side of her. He knows for a fact that they’re both vacant but the whole rest of the gym is, and he could go _anywhere_.

She keeps throwing punches out, her thumb pressing too hard on to the outside of her index finger as she clenches her fists tighter than she should. Her nails are pressing into her palms, sharp enough to make her bleed.

“You sure?” Bellamy asks, and she feels him step closer. “I can’t see anyone else using it,”

She takes her time in stepping away from the punching bag and walking around it, only turning the other way once she’s got her sweater in her hands so that she can wipe the sheen of sweat away from her face. Clarke refuses to become self-conscious about the puffy redness of her cheeks; she’s got so much to be self-conscious about nowadays.

It’s Wells’ hoodie. She doesn’t care if he notices that right now.

She drags it down across her face and then keeps it clutched in her hands as she faces him, a punching bag blocking half of his body from her view.

“You asked if it was free,” she snaps back, gaze lingering on the door through which he came. “It’s not.”

His lips are pursed, and she was wrong about what he was biting. He’s chewing on the inside of his cheek- maybe he’d be angry if he didn’t look so cautious. His hair is wet, she notices. There’s only really one reason why he’d take a shower _before_ coming to the gym. She wants to throw up.

“Clarke-”

“Come back later,” she waves a hand at Bellamy and realizes she can’t cross the wall of punching bags again and so settles for attacking this side of it now. Maybe if she hits it hard enough, it’ll catch him in the face on the recoil. “When I won’t be here.”

It might be petty, but she was here first.

“Clarke,” he tries again, taking just a step towards or around- they’re the same thing really- the punching bag and leaning his head so he can see her properly. His voice sounds impatient, like she’s the one being ridiculous.

“I’m busy.”

Bellamy sighs and she catches the movement he makes in her peripheral vision. That is where he lives now. Just on the outskirts of her life, pushing his way across that border like he knows he’s not welcome. His hand comes up to his hair and he runs his fingers back through it, frustratedly.

He doesn’t move any more than that and Clarke goes back to hitting the target, unable to put much restraint into it. It’s like her body needs him to know, is desperate for him to understand that she will be strong, that she can grow from this weakness. She punches as hard as she possibly can and he stills, settles in to watch her as though he’s waiting for her permission to start on either of the other two.

It’s a few moments, silence only punctuated by the grunts that leave her throat, the power she’s trying for becoming an audible push.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he says after a while of standing there. He’s got his arms crossed over himself. Clarke ignores him and just presses harder. Maybe if she punches hard enough then she might be able to make the bag bleed, and then he’ll see. “You’re not engaging your core.”

Every part of her body is tense. She doesn’t know how she can engage anything more than she already is. He just can’t see that she’s weak- that this is the furthest she can go. It’s not about using muscle; she can’t use it when it isn’t there.

Still, her fists prod the bag harder.

“Still wrong,”

“Leave me alone,” she growls underneath her heavy breath.

“You want to know how to take care of yourself or not?”

It’s like he’s trying to press buttons. Isn’t it enough for him to have walked out on her? He’s got to keep twisting the knife as well?

“I don’t need _your_ help,”

Her stomach flips at just the thought of him trying to help her. He approaches some more, close enough that the shadow he casts falls over Clarke’s face.

“Well, I don’t see anyone else around,”

He’s mocking her. He’s literally shrugging her off as though this is playful.

“Then let me do it on my own,” she says, lowering her voice because he’s close enough to hear her without projection, and she hasn’t got enough air in her lungs to talk any louder. She’s watching the bag so intensely that it might just split under the daggers she’s shooting. “You’ve gotten pretty good at that.”

There he goes. She’ll keep addressing what he did until he gets the message. It’s a low blow but she’s happy to aim lower if that’s what it takes.

“Clarke,” he tries again as though her name is going to unlock something between the two of them. She can’t remember the last time he said her name and she heard it as just that; a name. No, he says it as a step towards her that he knows he can’t command his feet to take.

She ignores it.

“Your core, Clarke,” Bellamy says tiredly, like he doesn’t want to have to do this. Doesn’t he realize that no one is compelling him to do it? He’s dropped all the ties that he wanted to drop- he’s got no obligation to be here now. “You’re small and you don’t have a lot of muscle-”

Clarke snorts, ugly.

“Wow,” she gushes. The smile that takes over her face hasn’t got an ounce of humor within it, it’s more of a snarl. “Thanks for enlightening me.”

She doesn’t need a man, the epitome of good looks and muscle, telling her so explicitly that she’s weak. Especially not him.

The hand that lands on her stomach does more than shock her. Shock is too much of an understatement considering the shudder that ripples the whole way through her body. The epicenter of the shiver flowing from the heat of his hand. Before she can even react, there’s another one falling to her back. If he were to press his palms together, Clarke knows she would snap between the two of them.

But he doesn’t. His touch is hovering, and it doesn’t have the certainty that it should have. His chest moves closer and brushes up against her shoulder.

Everything rational gets wiped from her mind in that and the only thing she can think is that Bellamy is touching her in a place that she can’t even look at without feeling ashamed. She’s glad, for once, that her cheeks are so pink because heat rises to them unnaturally fast and if she hadn’t been pushing so hard, the blush on her face would be undeniable.

Her breath comes out shaky and so she sucks in and blinks for longer than she should.

“You need to draw your strength from here,”

She’d forgotten about the height difference between them. He is over her and once upon a time, Clarke would have considered this shelter.

When he speaks, it’s quieter than she would have expected it to be. She hears a wobble in his voice. It’s like he’s afraid of breaking something as he talks, and Clarke wants to scoff at the absurdity of that.

His touch is more intimate than it should be, and for that, Clarke feels the anger surge like it hasn’t had the chance to do yet. She snaps her head to the side and his face is closer than she’d ever thought it would be again.

He’s leaning down, as though he’s going to whisper in her ear. Her forehead almost crashes into his and she would spit in his face if her mouth hadn’t gone completely dry.

“Don’t touch me,” This is a snarl now. She feels practically venomous.

The way his face blanks, all of the focus he’d been wearing draining out within a second, lets Clarke know that he hadn’t been thinking when he moved in to hold her. His hands drop down to his sides in the next as he realizes what he’s doing, and Clarke ignores the ice that washes over the now empty skin in favor of watching the guilt threaten to take over his face.

Bellamy goes back to chewing on his cheek to keep it down, but he doesn’t step away. If he steps away then he’ll be admitting that that wasn’t intentional.

Clarke wants to say it again. She wants to scream at him for even daring to touch her like that after what he’s done but his mouth opens.

She waits and no sounds leaves his lips. They’re both stood so close to the punching bag that it feels like it has built a wall around the two of them. A drop of water from one of his dangling curls falls on to the skin of Clarke’s forehead, and that drop, just that one drop feels dirty.

“Clarke,” he whispers her name this time, but she doesn’t know what is going to follow that.

“Stop,” a pause to keep her composure. “Pretending like you give any sort of crap about-”

“Clarke,”

Her hand comes up between the two of them and she places her palm against the center of his ribcage, pushing him away without an ounce of restraint. He stumbles back, only out of surprise.

“Stop it!” she shouts, falling back too because her feet aren’t as solid as his are. “Stop saying my name,” he doesn’t look away from her, but his eyebrows tighten again like he’s confused. “You don’t know me anymore!”

He drops his head so she can’t see his expression and his foot sweeps across the floor for a moment. She watches his sneaker as it crosses past his other leg, her jaw clenched tightly.

“You should know how to fight,” he says, and Clarke can hear that he’s forcing his voice to sound steady. It’s too deep, even deeper than it normally is, for that control to be easy.

 _So should you_ , she wants to answer him. She wants to say it so badly because it’s true. He should have known how to fight as well, but that’s too much.

“There’s a lot I should know,” is what Clarke settles for instead. A compromise with her bitterness and her fatigue. “But it seems I’m not gonna get any of my answers from you. And if you’re not going to leave me to do what I came here to do then,”

His head snaps up, shock all across his face like he’s surprised that she’s going to go somewhere else.

And she can’t stand the sight of him.

“Then I will leave you.”

She picks up Well’s hoodie again and makes sure to wipe away that stinging, burning hot drop of water from her forehead before she wrenches herself away from the punching bag. She heads for the door without looking back at Bellamy, and she hears him take the same steps that she does, following behind as though he’s going to try to stop her from walking away.

When Clarke reaches the door, and she yanks it open so forcefully that it slams into the other wall, his marching stops and she can hear him breathing into the space behind her and she can taste it. It is still smoke and fire and everything it was back when she knew who he was, and she lets the door smash into the latch when she stumbles away from the room.

And when she’s walking past the windows that separate the corridor from the gym, with the blinds strung up so that no one can look into either room; a wall, she only stops when something collides into one of the panes of glass.

Bellamy must have hit one of them, and his fist leaves a distorted spider web that crawls along the glass, a significant crack that will only take a single tap to break the window properly.

Clarke stills when the sound rings down the hall and she has to take a cool, sharp breath in, watching her trembling legs as she does so, before she can take off again.

So all of that control, all of that restraint when they were opposite each other, really was just a show. If he had to force himself to stay calm that hard, to the point where he punched a fucking window the second she left, then Clarke has her answer.

This is as hard for him as it is for her.

 

…

 

The team come back during Clarke’s shift. She doesn’t expect it, and she hasn’t been prepped on what to do at all, so it’s lucky that Jackson is here too because if she’d been here on her own, then they’d be waiting in one spot for longer than they should have to risk.

They catch sight of the big black rover rumbling across the clearing at the same time and Jackson tears over to the entrance to the wall, typing in a key code hurriedly and then taking a couple steps back from it with his hand over a large lever.

He’s got to get the timing right, she notes down. If he opens the wall too soon then there’s going to be a physical chink in the integrity of the base for too long. From what Clarke can see, there is nothing running after the rover, but it’s still a risk.

She realizes they aren’t going to stop when his hand slams down on to the lever, pulling it with all of his weight. They’ve got to be going at forty miles an hour at least, enough that if they smash into that wall, they’re going to get seriously hurt.

But they don’t smash into the wall, because Roan has probably done this more times than he could count and they are barreling through that gap only just wide enough, Jackson wrenching the lever back up before they’re even all the way through it.

Clarke spots a walker in the distance, following the exhaust trail hungrily, and she shoots it before she turns to the decelerating rover.

Raven and Wells aren’t the first ones that emerge from the back of it once the doors have been thrown open. Clarke’s heart lands somewhere in her throat as she cranes to find them but there they are, heavy packs on their shoulders and Wells’ hand slipping from Raven’s arm as they come tumbling out.

She probably shouldn’t ditch her post, but she does anyway, telling herself that it’ll only be for a moment. They’re both making their way towards her like they haven’t even considered walking into the building until they’ve said hi.

They look tired but not worn. Dirty but not disheveled.

“You’re early,” Clarke grins as she reloads her bow. She doesn’t squirm when Raven pulls her into a hug and her arms come up to rest around her friend’s for a second before they’re extracting themselves and she’s falling into Wells’ hold.

“Well if we left you and Murphy unsupervised for too long then one of you would find a way to get yourselves killed,” Raven smirks back, dropping her pack down to her boots and reaching around to rub at her shoulder.

Wells clears his throat, a little abrasively. Raven looks to him.

“Too soon?” she asks, not sounding like she cares all that much.

He just rolls his eyes and turns back to Clarke, as if to ask if she’s okay with joking about her near death experience. Clarke just shoves his shoulder in response, squeezing it to let him know she’s fine.

“Never too soon,” she assures Raven, winking. “Everyone get back okay?”

“Sure,”

Clarke catches Octavia getting out from the passenger seat of the rover and they make eye contact across the clearing. She’s too far away for Clarke to get a read on her.

“How was that?” she asks, nodding over to the girl.

“I’ll fill you in once I’ve spent a night in an actual bed,” Raven sighs and Wells looks at Clarke over her head, wariness and concern all over his face. “I swear, I have no idea how we made it out there for so long. We were living rough, that’s for sure,”

She’s still working on the knot in her shoulder and Clarke watches the rover slip around to the other side of the building, Gaia and Bryan in the back of it and Clarke guesses they’re going to drop off the supplies they managed to scavenge.

“Go get some rest you two,” she says, picking Raven’s bag up for her to drape it back over her shoulders. “And a shower. You smell awful,”

“Says the girl who stayed in the same hospital bed for four months,” Raven smirks and Wells shoots her another placid warning look. A side-eye to let her know that just because Clarke has given the go ahead to joke about that time, he doesn’t quite think it’s a laughing matter.

“See you for breakfast,” he calls back to Clarke pointedly, letting her know he’s going to make sure she eats tomorrow morning, but Clarke is too busy watching how his hand drifts back to rest on Raven’s elbow.

He’s not exactly steering her, or holding her with any sort of solid grip, but it’s a touch that isn’t necessary and it just seems… domestic.

That’s what he used to describe her and Murphy. Funny how that works.

 

…

 

“Okay,” Murphy slams down his tray into his spot, diagonally opposite Clarke. “I think Monty and Jasper are going out of their way to make this shit taste worse,”

“You haven’t even tried it yet,” Raven points out, stealing the slice of canned pineapple from his plate.

“I just know,”

“That won’t hold up in court, you know,” Clarke adds, slicing up her own slither of the sweetened fruit.

They’ve had to come back to Ark table now that Roan is here again. It’s not like that’s a particularly bad thing when the four of them are here, but she’s forced to have Bellamy and Echo in her sights and quite frankly, just the sight of them sat next to each other is enough to put Clarke off her food.

Octavia is literally on Lincoln’s lap as they eat, a few people down from her brother, and Clarke remembers that they’ve been separated for a few days. That would have felt like a lifetime six months ago.

Cage isn’t down here today. He’ll be eating with the commanders then.

“We’re finding Monty and Jasper tonight,” Raven says, like she’ll forget it if she doesn’t say it now. “It’s the first night where none of us are working. We’re celebrating,”

“Celebrating what?”

“Not dying, obviously,”

“Obviously,” Wells grins, nudging Clarke’s shoulder.

She’s about to ask what they are using to celebrate but then there’s something tugging on her sleeve and she looks down to her left to see Peter, the boy from yesterday, chewing on his lip.

“Clarke,” he says, quietly and flat.

She leans down closer to hear him and guesses that that was his intention because he stands on his tiptoes to whisper into her ear, glancing wearily at the people behind her.

“Momma’s working now. She told me to sit with Tommy and his father, but I don’t want to,”

He’s got the same red brick in his hand, gripping it. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got permanent imprints of the dots lining the top of the block on his palm.

Clarke sits back up, ignores Raven’s raised eyebrow, and looks down along the table for Roan. He’s right at the other end of it- he probably wouldn’t even notice if the kid squeezed in between her and Wells.

Peter is looking pointedly at her to avoid looking at any of the others. She can tell he wants her to come and sit with him somewhere else.

“You want to sit with me?” she whispers back.

“We aren’t allowed here,”

“Sh, we won’t tell anyone,”

Gesturing between the four of them forces him to look between this end of the table and his gaze catches cautiously on Murphy. Yeah, he’s not the right person for this.

She leans back so that he can see Wells.

“Remember that friend I told you about?” he nods eagerly, like he’s trying to pass a test. “Wells is the one who built the fort.”

She keeps her eyes on Peter, reassuring, but feels Wells wave his hand.

“He did?”

“Sure,” Wells answers, even if it isn’t his question. “I’d never been prouder of anything in my whole life and then _she_ knocked it down,”

He nudges Clarke’s shoulder like she knew he would.

“Come on,” she grins, standing up and pushing her tray to the corner of the table. “Let’s go get you some food.”

Peter holds on to her sleeve as they walk over to the serving station, awkwardly high, but Clarke doesn’t have it in her to brush him off. He doesn’t speak to the man behind the counter, so Clarke makes him point to which bread roll he’d like and then makes sure he gets at least one slice of pineapple because he’s eyeing it eagerly.

When they turn, Peter with his tray in hand, Clarke feels eyes on her, but she doesn’t meet them in fear that it’s Roan telling her to take the kid somewhere else. They walk back together, and he looks at her cautiously when she nods for him to scoot in next to Wells.

Raven asks him where he got his shoes from, because they are bright red sneakers that they’d never have gotten from the storerooms, and he becomes distracted with talking to her, too much to care that he’s on a table filled with intimidating people.

Clarke grins when Peter gives Wells his block of Lego for inspection and she’s distracted by the amusement of it all that she doesn’t even notice him at first. It requires a double take before Clarke can confirm whose eyes were following her back from the food station.

Bellamy is watching her, eyes narrowed like he’s trying to work something out. His eyes fall to the kid for a moment and then they flick back to her, only a second before he realizes that Clarke has spotted him.

He’s opposite her side, and quite a few people down. He doesn’t have to turn his head to see her, but his irises are in the corner of his eyes and they shoot back to the center like he’s been shocked.

Clarke sees him clear his throat even if she can’t hear it, then watches as he turns it into a cough. He doesn’t look back over in this direction at all.

 

…

 

Clarke doesn’t go to the gym today. It’s been tainted and she can’t so much as walk past that crack in the window without feeling her knees go weak. When Roan sees it, he’s not going to be happy. She knows that much at least but wonders if he’ll figure out who did it.

With the lack of a reaction to the way Bellamy went for Murphy, his temper must be pretty normal around here now. He might just get away with this too.

Instead, Clarke goes running around the building as much and as far as she can risk going without getting in the way of people. She goes up and down a few flights of stairs, circles Ark floor, and then showers under a weak, icy flow for about an hour afterwards to wash away all of the grime that isn’t really there.

She finds Raven in their room; around the time the sun would be setting if either of them could actually see it.

“Feeling better?”

She’s laid out along her bed, eyes closed and facing out to the room with a blank expression. She’s not asleep, just resting.

“It was only a food rekkie,” Raven shrugs, finger dancing along the pole of the bedframe. “It wasn’t too bad.”

“Not what I asked,”

Clarke jumps up to sit on top of her dresser so that she can talk to Raven and actually see her. There’s not much of an easier way to do that in here.

“You set Octavia on me, didn’t you?”

It comes out flat, unimpressed, like she’s known this all along.

“Not exactly,” Clarke tries, using logic just in case she’s in trouble. Raven opens one eye, squeezing the other one shut tighter, suspiciously. “She asked me if I’ve forgiven her. I told her that I couldn’t until you have too.”

“It’s that easy?”

“It shouldn’t be, but it is. What did you talk about?”

“She didn’t make excuses or anything. It’s Octavia so she wouldn’t dream of it, but she said that just because she had a responsibility to be there for her brother while they were mourning, it doesn’t make us her family any less. I told her she’s waited too long. I probably went a bit too far by saying that she wouldn’t have even considered apologizing if you were dead, but she took it well. Too well,”

Clarke hums, listening.

“Lincoln has definitely calmed her down. If you’re wondering, she doesn’t know why Bellamy did what he did. She said she could take a pretty good guess, but it isn’t her place either way. She knows what she’s done to fuck up and there’s enough guilt there that she probably can’t handle her brother’s too,”

“This isn’t about Bellamy,”

“You kidding?” Raven scoffs, opening her eyes just to roll them. “Of course it’s about him. Clarke he’s the one who left. Don’t forget that,”

She seems a little wary, eyebrows lifted in warning as though she thinks Clarke is trying to make excuses for him.

“Let’s think about this for a minute,” Clarke tries, swinging her legs so that they bounce off the wooden dresser. “We’re mad at Octavia because..?”

Raven snorts but humors her, like Clarke knew she would. They’re going to go around in circles if they keep trying to think with their hearts.

“Because she ran out when we needed her,” she answers simply.

“And that’s everything?”

“I could probably think of something else, but that’d be my own pettiness. That’s the baseline of it, yeah,”

“Okay and why did she do that?”

“I’m not about to make excuses for Octavia Blake, Clarke,” she hums, sounding almost disappointed. Clarke looks up at her and raises an eyebrow skeptically.

“Not excuses, just… understanding,”

“Their mom died, and it was probably too much for the both of them, seeing you in a hospital bed so close to death too. They wanted to distance themselves from you to stop it hurting so much,”

Clarke gets hooked on what Raven says first: she doesn’t know _how_ their mother died.

“That’s understandable,” Clarke grimaces thoughtfully, arm slung over the other one.

“But it was selfish,”

“True,”

“We needed them,”

“But they probably needed you too, Rae. There were three of you and two of them,”

Raven considers this for a moment and cocks her head to the side.

“You think she was mad that we chose you over them?”

“Not mad. Hurt a little? She understands it but that doesn’t mean it was good,”

“So where does all of this leave us?”

“Well, do you miss her?” Clarke asks through a sigh, sliding away from the cabinet as she checks her watch.

“Of course I do. But I can’t look at her face without seeing all the reasons _why_ I have to miss her,”

“Learn to,”

Raven sits up too, stretching her arms over her head.

“Why?”

“Because she’s looking for forgiveness. She wants to move past it. It might take time, it’ll take effort and a fuckload of patience, but she wants us, and we want her and _that_ is the best we’re gonna get from any of this,”

“Clarke I-”

“Octavia knows what she did was wrong, and she wants…” Clarke struggles to find the word for a moment, hands waving in the air as though she might be able to catch it. “Atonement.”

“So what do we do? We just forget about four months? It’s easy for you to do, Clarke, you weren’t the one who had to actually live through it,” Raven scoffs again, voice not dipped in bitterness or anger, maybe just dismissal, but it’s definitely climbing, and Clarke has been waiting for this. “Me and Murphy had to lose people who we trusted because of our own fucking loyalties-”

“And I am sorry for making you choose between us!”

“It wasn’t a choice. You were dying!”

Neither of them want to shout at the other but they are both on solid ground and are stepping towards each other, fingers pointed and eyes a little frenzied.

“Bellamy pushed away. Octavia followed because he is her big brother and they needed each other. It wasn’t a choice for her either,”

“And what about you!? All that shit he spoke about not wanting to break you but look at you, Clarke! Look at what he’s done to you,”

She knows it’s not meant to be an insult to Clarke, but it certainly feels that way.

“What do you want me to say?” she asks, voice scratchy. “That he broke me? That I know he doesn’t want me _because_ I’m broken? That having Octavia come here, apologizing, is so much more than he has given?”

“We sat there for four months while they treated us like we were nothing to them,”

“For different reasons,”

“And how do you know that?” Raven questions, calming.

“Because she changed her mind. And he didn’t. She didn’t forget about us like you think she did-” _like he did._ “It wasn’t like that for her; she just had different priorities, just like you. She didn’t move on. She took time to heal and… I don’t blame her for doing that. It’s not the same as wanting to ignore someone, as pleading Roan to keep you as far away as possible, or going out of the way to tell you that you’re weak-”

“Bellamy did that?” she is shocked, and Clarke forgets that she hasn’t had time to mention what happened in the gym, or while they were on duty.

She closes her eyes for a minute, because she’s made it this far without crying and she’s not going to let herself down now. She doesn’t reopen them when she starts speaking once more.

“There is a solid difference between what the two of them have done,” Clarke repeats, taking a shuddered breath between every few words to hold back what she still can. “This, all of this _shit_ ,” she kicks the bedpost on her way towards it and it might be hard enough to break her little toe but it’s uncontrollable. “Is my fault. And I don’t want you to lose a friend because of it.”

Raven had her before the world started to die out. They are both still alive and that is more than what a lot of other people have. Clarke is facing the wall, hands reaching out towards it but not touching it as she gets ready to brace herself. She doesn’t see Raven come up closer behind her and doesn’t know that her hand is going to land on to Clarke’s shoulder until it does just that.

And Clarke flinches but doesn’t move away. Her whole body tenses up and yet she’s pathetic and so she freezes.

“I am sorry,” she whispers but the way Raven squeezes her shoulder, how it tightens maybe too hard to just be one-sided comfort, says forgiveness.

It says, ‘I forgive you,’ in just the same way that Murphy said it.

“I think we could both use a drink right about now,”

 

…

 

Moonshine. Fucking moonshine.

The four of them head down to the labs once they’ve been to the mess and Clarke does try not to ask too many questions, but she can’t help herself.

In the end it’s Wells that lets her know that Jasper and Monty have been using their spare time to brew their own moonshine. She asks if anyone higher up knows about that, because she’s pretty sure that that would not be condoned if they did. This is an enclosed space after all; the last thing people should have to worry about is drunks wondering around the place.

“You should cut them some more slack,” Raven snorts, skipping ahead.

So apparently nobody else knows.

Clarke really can’t stand the labs as they are. The fluorescence is on another level in here, and the whole thing is just so clinical. It’s too much of a reminder of her old life and of the path she used to be on.

But she enters with the rest of them and smirks when she sees all of the equipment that had been sprawled over multiple desks- and really, is too valuable to not be taken care of- pushed into one big pile on top of one table in the far corner.

There is a microscope hovering dangerously close to the edge of it all and Wells heads over to steady it, his lips invisible as he grimaces at the state of this room.

Monty and Jasper are on either side of the central desk, raised so that the ledge of it comes up to Clarke’s ribs and they’re perched on stools without backs to them.

They’re taking in turns throwing a pen at each other’s face, both wearing bulky lab goggles over their eyes, and Jasper hits Monty square in the nose on the first try that Clarke sees.

“So this is what you two do all day,” Murphy says, lacking in sarcasm. “No wonder your food tastes like shit.”

Jasper spins around to face him, the remains of a cheesy grin on his face and while he replies, Monty grabs a glass beaker from his side and takes a large swig from the colorless liquid inside, wincing minutely.

“Looks like Murphy’s forgotten who’s in charge around these parts,”

“Where?” Raven snorts. “Everywhere the light touches?”

Wells heaves a sigh as he pulls a stool to sit next to Monty.

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t just hear you make a Lion King reference,”

He takes the beaker from Monty’s extended hand and then eyes it suspiciously for a moment, leaning his hand around in a circle as he makes the contents of it swirl.

“It’s not poisonous,” Monty grins, his eyes a little too heavy for him to be perfectly sober. Clarke wonders how long they’ve been playing whatever drinking game involves tossing a pen at another person’s face. “Promise.”

“This is a dumb idea,”

“And yet here you are,”

“If Roan or any of the commanders find out about this…” Wells trails off, still watching the insides of the beaker, half filled, probably with a few shots’ worth.

“Okay if I hear anyone else talking trash then I’m gonna throw you all out,” Jasper groans, adjusting the goggles, only making them wonkier.

“Hey, I haven’t said anything yet,” Clarke drops down on to a seat on her own side of the table, in between Jasper and Monty’s like she’s acting as a mediator between the two of them.

Wells looks up to the ceiling as he takes a drink and he’s never been very good at handling his liquor so when he takes the glass from his lips, he winces dramatically and makes a couple retching sounds into the inside of his elbow.

Raven bursts out laughing and then approaches the table, after having made a round of the room, inspecting all of the different instruments. She yanks the cup from his hand and takes a shot of her own.

Her reaction is a lot less dramatic, just a slight narrowing of her eyes and the corners of her mouth wrinkle up in disgust.

“The shit at the farm was nicer,” she decides, placing it down on to the surface of the desk and sliding it over like a hockey puck.

Jasper throws his forehead down, drawing with him an exasperated sigh of annoyance. He leaves his head there; perhaps it’s become too heavy to hold up.

“I thought we agreed that tasted like bleach?” Clarke smirks back, raising the beaker to eye level so she can check it. “You guys made this?”

“Yuh huh. First batch that hasn’t made us completely black out. Count yourselves lucky that we’re sharing it,” Monty says nonchalant as he lines his next shot up for Jasper’s forehead.

It misses and clatters down on to the floor.

Murphy is still checking something out on the outskirts of the room, picking causally through vials and jars and Clarke has a feeling she knows what he’s looking for.

Her tongue goes numb the second she feels the moonshine pour into her mouth. Just numb. Her taste buds just seem to give up on themselves. Either that or the alcohol is strong enough to kill them all off.

“I’m not saying anything,” she croaks out when Jasper turns on her, waiting expectantly for her to inevitably insult the drink. It is warm as it trickles down her throat and she feels as it lands into her stomach, destroying all of the butterflies that live there with the probably unsafe concentration.

She clears her throat to soothe the burns that it has left behind and even as she does it, her head starts to spin. She can’t work out if she’s gotten bigger or if the room has gotten smaller and Clarke has to close her eyes for a moment to ease the confusion.

“It can’t be that bad,” Murphy stalks over, obviously having had no luck at finding any attempts at a new and improved version of their algae. He snatches the beaker from Clarke’s hand roughly and downs half of its contents before anyone can warn him against it.

He doesn’t even flinch. Instead, his head starts nodding back and forth on his neck and he raises his sleeve up to wipe at his mouth. Clarke can tell he’s trying to keep his cool just for the show of it, so she kicks him in the shins and it’s the trigger that makes him open his mouth and release the few choked coughs he’d been holding back.

Taking it back, Clarke takes a drink again and spends a few moments adjusting to the drowsiness that hits her like a wave.

“That stuff is legal,” she hums but her words are already starting to slur. “Wait, lethal,”

Monty grins and dodges the pen that goes flying at his head. He drinks again anyway.

“It’s certainly not legal,”

And it just goes around like that. Clarke isn’t sure how much she drinks in total but somehow, they keep managing to refill the beaker when it starts to run low and it’s definitely late when Jasper is the one to fall asleep.

They are all severely, sufficiently out of it. Even Wells loosens up, perhaps not extending as far as the rest of them, but he drinks enough to stop thinking this is a bad idea. Murphy holds his drink the best out of the lot of them but him and Clarke end up with their shoulders leaning against each other’s, clearly unable to hold themselves up on their own.

It’s the kind of drunk where Clarke finds herself forgetting the words that leave her mouth the second they’ve left it and she also just doesn’t care. It’s nice not to have a filter and to not have to worry about the consequences of that either.

Wells calls time and lets Raven roll into his guiding arm when they stand up because she’s evidently gone to jelly, and for some reason that she’ll never be able to find, Clarke finds that hilarious.

Monty mumbles something almost incoherent about how him and Jasper will just camp down here tonight. Apparently that’s what they did on the nights when they almost poisoned themselves with other test batches and so they’ve gotten used to sleeping on a desk.

The four of them attempt to makes themselves appear much more sober than they have any shot at being, but Murphy has got his arm thrown all the way around Clarke and Wells is walking Raven more than she’s walking herself.

They stumble. Clarke falls over when they get to a staircase and she stays there on her hands and knees until Murphy tries to get her to stand back up, just in case she falls back on her own and smashes her head open again.

The memory is a fog when it sinks back in. Just a dark grey cloud hovering over her and when Murphy’s clumsy grip pulls her up and along the rail, he’s trying to drag her out from under it. It follows.

They get to the wall by Ark, and it must take something like twenty minutes for Wells to remember the keycode to this floor, but he does and then has to convince Raven and Murphy that it might not be such a good idea to fall asleep out here.

Clarke watches their interaction, giggling when Wells grabs Murphy roughly by the shoulder and throws him through the doorway. But the blood that is running through her veins is so light right now and this is only going to last for a certain amount of time. She doesn’t just want to sleep that away.

This is her time to forget about… whatever it was that happened, and she can’t waste that just going through the motions with the nightmares. Crawling back into a splotchy mattress and waking up two hours later, screaming, is not how Clarke wants to make use of all of this easiness.

“You guys go,” she hums as she tries to balance on both feet.

“You’re comin’,” Wells sighs, walking over tiredly to reach for her. Clarke pushes away and backs up on the stairs behind her feet. “Clarke,”

“M’just not sleepy. I want…” she points upwards, knowing exactly where she wants to go to, but he might not understand that.

Wells throws a hand over his face and drags it over his eyes, pulling down at the skin of his forehead as he mutters something about having three children. Raven’s cackles ring out from the other side of the door and he looks over to it, torn. They’ll be getting up to trouble without him there; Clarke is aware enough to know that.

“Bye Wells,” she calls and surprises herself with how loud her own voice is, claps a hand over her open mouth as she turns on her heels to take the ticket out. If she just gets away while he’s distracted then he won’t care all that much.

Clarke tears up the flight, taking them two at a time because it reduces the chances of her falling over. She clings to the rail with both hands and finds it funny when she throws her head out to the center of the staircase, enjoys looking down to the inward spiral that looks like it’ll never end. It just sinks lower and lower and from here, it goes all the way to the center of the Earth.

Her heavy head leads the way up until Clarke gets to the fire door and she leans on the handle for a moment but doesn’t push against it, her forehead finding comfort in the cold surface of the door. Maybe sleep is a good idea right now. Maybe if she sleeps right at the top of the only world she’s got, the nightmares won’t be able to reach her.

Her decision gets made for her when she leans a little too heavily and she accidentally forces the door open under her weight. It’s a stumble as she tries to regain her footing, and Clarke’s ears feel like they’re underwater when the wind hits them.

“Shit,” she gasps, flying through to the roof and she’d forgotten how much it reminds her of an abandoned parking complex.

She holds on to the edge of the door, hanging open like a wound, and waits until she can catch her breath before she moves any further in.

“Clarke?”

Bellamy is sat, pretty much in the exact same place that Clarke had shot an arrow off from the other night. So close to that point, that she may as well have tied a rope to the arrow, one end around him so that he could be pulled along with it.

She hadn’t seen him; his midnight hair and black combat jacket make for a pretty good camouflage into the crystal sky. But now that she knows where he is, she can see his outline, a shadow blocking the stars.

She had been laughing, maybe from her own clumsiness, maybe from the rush of being outside, maybe because she’s drunk way past her limit. Either way, that gets taken away now.

“Shit,” she thinks she mumbles, still clinging on to the door.

Bellamy has turned around to see who wrenched the door open and Clarke tries not to look at him.

“I’ll come back later,”

There’s enough distance between the two of them that, paired with the darkness and Clarke’s hazy ability to see even mere feet in front of her face, neither can read the other one properly.

She turns, not really thinking all that much of it, but his voice cuts every rational thought away from her head.

“No,” he says, hesitant but stubborn. “There’s room out here for two people.”

With a head thrown over one shoulder, Clarke looks back to him. She considers and from the rough silhouette she can see, he doesn’t look like he cares all that much about her being here. He might just be resigned to the fact that they’re never going to be able to completely avoid each other.

“Not for me and you though,” Clarke decides, still slurring uncontrollably. It feels like a good idea to point that out, even if it is the booze talking.

He takes her in for a moment. She can feel his scrutiny from all the way over here, across the radius of the roof as she clutches to the center of it and he traces the outskirts.

“Are you drunk?”

He sounds confused. Of course he would be; he doesn’t know about the moonshine. She won’t try to deny it, there’d be no point in that. Clarke watches as he scoots to the right a little, like he’s making room, but the ledge stretches across the whole roof and it’s not like they _need_ to be close.

“I think so,”

Another moment of examination and Clarke looks down to her hand, knuckles turning white from gripping the lever so hard.

“You can sit here,” he offers, nonchalant and stiff at the same time. “I’ll be gone in a minute.”

 _You already are_ , she wants to say, but the whole reason she came out here wasn’t to make cheap shots at Bellamy. She wanted to hang her legs over the side of a building that has become literally all she can see, and she wanted to breathe.

So she walks over to him. Maybe if Clarke were sober, she’d make the rational decision and she’d go to the opposite side of this one foot wall, and they wouldn’t even have to look at each other as they gazed up at the night sky. But he’s made a show of making room for her and it’d be weird not to take that space, she reasons with drunken logic.

Clarke wishes that, when she gets close enough to him, she could learn the details of him that she has begun to forget; like just how sharp the corner of his jaw really is, or perhaps which direction the jut of his once-broken nose points to. She’s drunk though, and all she can muster is ‘This is Bellamy and he still looks gorgeous,’ and then immediately hates herself for it.

He keeps his eyes trained to the outside beyond the wall as Clarke lowers down next to him, but she feels them shift as her legs swing over the side. Just her feet, she sees him take notice of. He’s only watching the sneakers, as though he’s making sure they aren’t going to drag her down once they lose the security of solid ground.

She probably spreads out a bit too much, and Clarke thinks she is smiling but it’s not because she’s happy. Just buzzed.

They are silent for so long. The minute he promised definitely comes and passes and he stays where he is. There is a good couple of feet of space between them- she wonders if that’ll ever close up.

Clarke knows when he starts looking up at the sky and gets the feeling that that was what he must have been doing before she interrupted.

“Why are you out here?” Clarke asks when the silence becomes too much. She can hear his head thinking all the way from over here.

She tries to find the same spot in the sky that he’s watching but the sky is big and there are so many stars out there that the odds of them looking at the same one will make that impossible.

“Nobody else comes out here,” he answers quietly. The sky isn’t made of glass, but he talks to it as though it is.

“I do,”

If it weren’t so quiet, Clarke wouldn’t be able to pick up on the laugh that he breathes through his nose. He keeps his top lip under his bottom one as he cranes his neck a little higher, a wry smile as he speaks.

“Of course you do,”

She doesn’t really know how to take that. Her brain isn’t quite functioning right now, after all.

Clarke shrugs her shoulders and looks sharply to the right of her. It feels refreshing to look at absolutely nothing at all for a moment. Nothing instead of the stars and his goddamn cheekbones.

“It’s my new hiding spot. You took the gym from me,”

If this is honesty then it’s not going to do her any good after tonight. He doesn’t even deserve her honesty anymore.

There’s quiet for a while longer as they both let that linger in the crisp air. It’s still cold for summer. June nights were meant to be muggy and humid and easier.

He’s not biting at the digs she’s made so far. The sober part of her brain wants to see how far she can get. The drunk part is a lot weaker; some of her wants to see just how long they can pretend to be civil for.

“Where’d you even get the drinks from?” he asks, sighing like he has been holding his breath.

“Jasper,” Clarke gives and that’s enough for some time more.

Her heels bounce against the wall. They remind her of bullets as they ricochet. His hands are clasped in his lap while hers are balanced on the edge behind her, keeping her up as she leans all of her weight into her straightened arms. Opposites.

“What are you looking for?” she wonders. Curiosity and the lack of a filter getting the better of her.

His answer comes without missing a beat, as though it was waiting to leap from the tip of his tongue throughout all of this quiet.

“Salvation maybe,” voice rigid, casual. “People used to pray to the stars.”

“You’re praying?” she feels her nose scrunch up naively on her face and he looks at her for the first time in what feels like ages; not turning his head just letting her catch his side-eye.

His lips stay straight but they are wobbling a little, perhaps fighting off a smile. Is he laughing at her face? No, it feels more familiar than that. It’s a smirk that he’d give if they were sharing an inside joke, but Clarke doesn’t get it.

“I wouldn’t even know what to pray for,” and that must be a sufficient answer because he stops talking again. She doesn’t search for anything to say. “Why do you come out here?”

Clarke sighs heavily but her bottom lip pouts and the air rushes up through her nose, lifting the tufts of hair that have fallen into her face, sloppy. She sees that smile again, from the corner of her eye. It might not even actually be there, but it helps to think he’s finding amusement from this. If it’s an illusion then it’s a helpful one.

Apparently she’s going to be honest again. She only realizes that once the words have tumbled out.

“To breathe,” she says and hears her own voice sound simple. “I get dreams and I think there’s a monster under my bed.”

“A monster?”

Again, response ready and waiting. Maybe they haven’t lost that then; she breathes in and he still breathes straight back out.

“We didn’t have beds out there,”

She vaguely gestures to the space on the other side of the wall and hopes he understands that she’s talking about the country that they walked across together.

Another rushed breath of air as he half-asses a laugh.

“Monsters don’t just live under beds anymore, Princess.”

And the world turns on its head and they aren’t at the top of it anymore. Clarke’s stomach, along with the rest of her internal organs, drops the second she hears that name slip from his mouth. So naturally, so fluidly, that maybe he’s the drunk one.

Bellamy freezes up too. He notices his mistake at the same time she does, and he clamps his lips shut, eyes fluttering closed- almost guiltily- as his head cranes back even further.

Once she’s managed to recover, Clarke risks properly looking at him for the first time. Her brain is too quiet to focus on anything small, so she just settles for learning the simple parts of him. Like the shape of his silhouette and the boyish length of his hair.

“I miss that,” she admits and knows just the sad smile that she’s wearing. “I think I miss everything about you now.”

He takes a while to respond as he straightens his head and turns to look at her too. Lips pursed, chewing the inside of his cheek as they just watch each other, both of them acting like they’ve got all the time in the world.

“You should hate me now,” Bellamy decides, eyes heavy, voice still, shoulders slumped in defeat.

“Oh I do,” the words leave her mouth before she can even begin to comprehend them. He doesn’t even react. “I do hate you. I hate you until I remember-”

“Remember what?” he cuts her off, but she hadn’t hesitated. Almost like he couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say.

_Remember how much I loved you._

“Nothing. I hate you.”

“Good,”

It doesn’t feel good to say it out loud, but it also doesn’t feel bad either. It’s just… a statement of fact.

“You hate me too right?” she asks, light and easy, in a way she hasn’t been for a while. The question should be loaded with everything that has happened, but it isn’t. It is just simple, basic curiosity. She asks it knowing that whatever answer he gives, she won’t have any sort of emotional response to it.

There’s that smile again; tiny and just on the cusp of fleeting.

“No,”

But Clarke waves a hand.

“Nobody does what you did to people they don’t hate. You _do_ hate me,”

“I could never hate you,” a pause as he considers voicing his next thought. They are protected by the strength of the wind though; anything they were scared of admitting before tonight can just get carried off with that. Neither of them are going to be able to cling to it themselves anyway. “I hate myself for what I did to you.”

She’s drunk. She has to keep reminding herself of that as the world wobbles beneath her, and above her, and all around her. Yet a memory creeps up from behind her and taps her on the back, urges her to say the words because it knows it’ll just be uncomfortable for her to keep them in.

“Love… humiliates you but… hatred cradles you,” she mumbles, hoping she’s got that right. It could have come from anywhere.

“Who said that?” Bellamy asks, simple again.

“Some book,” she hopes.

Some silence as the cogs in his head churn.

“Do you believe it?”

Clarke turns to him again and takes the hint of a smile he’s been flashing up to this point.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore. I’m very confused now. People are trying, you know they really are, to help me understand but I don’t think I ever will. I’ve got all this… anger that I don’t know what to do with and the worst part is, I don’t even know who I’m angry at,”

“You should be angry at me. No one else,”

He says it so resignedly, so easily. His answer just spills into the night because it is what he knows to be true.

“What happened to you, Bellamy?” saying his name for the first time reminds Clarke of the fizzing she can feel on her tongue. “You were a good man.”

Another scoff and he gives up on watching his fingers dance in his lap, lifting his eyes again to the stars.

“I was never any good. You just saw something in me that was never really there,”

“That’s not true,” she waves dismissively, not having time for pity with the daze the moonshine has given.

A stranger would see this man and would read him as the definition of peace. A stranger would never know how Bellamy lies. Clarke sees nothing of peace.  

“Can I tell you something?”

“What is it?” he asks.

“Part of me wishes I never woke up,” Clarke can feel his eyes fall back to her face but she won’t be able to say this if she’s looking at him so she takes over his watch of the stars, following them in the way he might do. “Part of me wishes I’d died not knowing what you did to me. That’s the part of me that hates you,”

Burning. That’s what his eyes always did to her, they always burned, and she loved that. He’s burning into her right now. She can feel his gaze steady on the side of her face as she adamantly learns the night sky.

Then Bellamy clears his throat and it sounds ragged, shaky, so different to how his eyes felt.

“And the other part?”

“Oh. Well, that part still wants to rip all of your clothes off,” it has the desired effect. It sucks away all and none of the tension at once because Bellamy makes that shallow laughing sound again. It’s a distraction from the things she’s already said. “I’ve learned to ignore that though. That part is what got me into this whole mess in the first place.”

He waits, no, they both do. Clarke tries to find something she can recognize in the sky as he still burns into her, unashamed and not even trying to make it look like he isn’t staring. Perhaps he’s trying to learn her all over again too.

“Are you going to remember this by tomorrow?” he asks, quietly. Almost shy for the first time.

“Probably not,”

Clarke wonders if that makes this conversation irrelevant.

“Why? Are you going to say something you won’t want me to remember?”

“It’s probably for the best if you didn’t,” he sighs heavily and waits what feels like another hour before he continues. “Truth is, you were the best thing that ever happened to me, and when you died, a piece of me died too. That Bellamy died when you did,”

It’s his voice that draws her back to him and it’s fucked up but they both just sort of smile apologetically at one another for a moment. They’ve reached a plane of understanding, or at least, drunk Clarke has.

“Do you think he’ll come back?” she asks, cocking her head to the side, maybe too far but her orientation is all over the shop right now. His smile widens, flittering between being there and not, and she can’t read the expression for what it is. He’s not mocking her. He’s not being cruel. It’s genuine, just for a glimpse. “It’d be cool if he came back. _I_ came back. And I want him, not whoever you are,”

He doesn’t flinch but she knew he wouldn’t.

“I know,” he says back, voice carrying none of the blame that it should after hearing something like that.

A thought pops into her mind and it spreads like a tumor over mere seconds, to the point where it becomes painful just to hold it back any longer.

“How’s the sex?”

He splutters, chokes on nothing but air, and looks down at his hanging feet as the flush rises up his neck, visible even in the depths of night.

“The what?” he asks, strained.

Clarke only shrugs. She’s trying to work out why she’s not having a reaction to this, but it’s a lost cause.

“The walls are pretty thin, but you never struck me as the type of person to keep it down. I’ve had loud sex people before. You’re a loud sex people,”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said before that you don’t mind talking about sex with me,” she smirks, and maybe something about that is funny but she can’t find it. It doesn’t feel funny. “You’re seeing someone,” she shrugs again, letting him know it’s okay that she knows this. “Echo, right? She doesn’t like me very much,”

She feels his burning eyes roaming all over her, and she wonders why he’s radiating so much confusion. There are a few moments where he seems to process what she’s saying, and she gives up on being patient, and turns to him with a small smile on her face. She opens her mouth to start talking, knows there are words somewhere for her to find, but his expression catches her off guard.

He looks hurt.

“You seriously think that I’d-” he cuts off, must think better of it.

“Huh?” Clarke asks, not quite able to catch it because she becomes distracted by the length of his eyelashes, and the pull at the corner of his mouth.

“Clarke,” he sounds pained. Part of her is glad. “Me and Echo aren’t… I’m not having- I wouldn’t do that,”

She considers him and tries to figure out what any of that means.

“Why not?”

“Are you kidding?” he asks, softly, faintly, maybe so that there’s a chance she might miss it.

“No,”

“Clarke-”

“I don’t understand that either. You still say my name the same way,”

He blanks for a moment, probably trying to adjust to the stark change in topic.

“There’s no other way to say it?” he answers, as a question. Like he genuinely believes that he leaves it as just a name each time.

He sounds innocent with that answer. Younger than all of this time has made him feel.

“We’re never going to be us again, are we?” and when Clarke whispers that, voice maybe too quiet for him to pick it up, she knows that this is one of those loaded questions. The kind they’d been avoiding earlier.

He clears his throat again, but it’s less welcoming, more hostile; guarded.

“You really want that? After I abandoned you?”

She tries not to read into the structure of his tone. There are so many layers to it that she’ll never be able to work them all out. There is simplicity in it and candor on the surface, but beneath that Clarke can hear something rattled, and nervous in a way. Like he’s torn between the two answers that she could possibly give to the question he asks.

“I just want to be okay again,” Clarke answers in the only way she knows how.

“And you will be,” he shoots back, immediate like he’d never have doubted that. His faith in that makes her want to scream. “But I don’t deserve a place in your life anymore, Princess.”

She takes a shaky breath and can’t look at the sky any longer because it isn’t the same. All of those nights they spent looking up to a shared universe, weren’t made of magic because of the stars. They were made of magic because of him. And he’s gone.

“You’re right,” she decides and picks herself up, knees buckling slightly. If she were anywhere else other than on the ledge of a ten-story building, she’d probably have fallen down by now. Clarke stands over him, but the line of her sight drifts past him and on to the other side of his body, so that she doesn’t actually have to look. “I hate you.”

Bellamy doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t look up from his thumbs frozen in his lap either, so Clarke just takes that as her cue to leave. She’s steadily sobering, and that vindictive, bitter part of her is starting to rise back up. Civility is gone. Simplicity is gone.

She jumps down and rides the stumble out, drifting too far to the left on her way to the door.

“Good,” he says to the wall guarding the entire base. ‘Good’ isn’t ‘good’ though, not the way he says it.

‘Good’ means ‘I know, Clarke.’

‘Good’ means ‘I hate me too,’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Guess that I'm a fool for the way that you caught me,'  
> \- Fade, Lewis Capaldi


	30. Did you come to see me fall?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters are getting longer... help.

Clarke wakes up to the crashing of a shoe against the inside of the door to their room.

Her first thought, as she struggles to unstick her eyes, is that there is something impossibly heavy at the back of her head. Right at the base of her skull, around the area that she smashed it open. The weight is warm, almost feeling like liquid as it rolls when she moves.

Hangovers are like nothing else. It’s a friendly sort of pain. It’s not the kind that scares you away, as pain should really do, but it’s a reminder.

The next thing Clarke’s mind wanders towards is how a shoe could have hit the wall from that direction, almost like it was thrown from above her. But that would mean Raven had shoes up there on her bed with her, which doesn’t quite make sense.

And then she realizes that Raven wouldn’t have chucked it for no reason, and that brings her to the careless grunts coming from the other side of the door and she barely has time to register who that is before it’s being swung open again.

Murphy comes in, crouching pointedly this time but he brings with him a harsh spotlight that clearly isn’t wanted by either of them, if the next sneaker that comes tumbling down is any sort of hint. Raven misses him, so far off that she probably threw it with her eyes still closed, and it doesn’t make him retreat this time.

He knows she only has two.

He’s closely followed by Wells and Murphy doesn’t even hesitate to sink down on to the end of Clarke’s bed, head balanced awkwardly against the post.

“Rise and shine,” he grimaces, sunken eyes closing.

Clarke kicks at his leg but he doesn’t shift. She shoves her head underneath her lumped pillow as Wells flicks a switch that sets the whole room alight.

“Piss off,” Raven growls from above all of them and chooses to drop her pillow down next. Wells is slumped against the door though, with a hand on one side of his face, and Murphy is under shelter.

Clarke kicks him again.

“You can’t just use my bed as cover,”

“Watch me,”

“Go annoy Raven,” she begs, pushing her head further up the mattress to drown the lot of them out.

“If you come up here then I promise you, I will kill you,”

“This room smells like a brewery,” Wells sounds like he’s wincing.

“And I’m sure yours is so much better,”

“Flowers and sunshine, Reyes,”

A heavy weight slumps over Clarke’s feet and she knows he’s given up on sitting upright, having collapsed awkwardly along the single bed.

“Why can I still hear you two shitheads?”

Murphy prods Clarke’s hip with his thumb to get her attention, still sprawled, perpendicular, over her legs. She sighs as she takes her head out from under the pillow and barely squints her eyes over at him in question.

“Isn’t she just a dream?” he presses his lips together a little too hard for that to be a genuine smile and Clarke smirks back before retreating to the comfort of the darkness beneath the pillow.

Wells ignores the lot of them.

“Roan wants a team meeting at twelve and if we’re being shipped off again then we could do with some food,”

“Sorry, I can’t hear you,” Murphy scowls, head thumping against the wall. “There are bombs going off in my mind.”

“Shut up then,” Clarke tosses underneath her blanket, wriggling to hide from the light some more.

“Wells give me my shoes,”

“Really,” he says, sounding amused. “ _Now_ she wants her shoes.” That must be to Murphy.

“What time is it?” Raven asks, blanking out their teasing and the springs of her mattress creak.

“Eight-thirty,”

“Shit,”

“Come on,” he offers, and Clarke smacks her pillow. “Nothing like Monty’s algae to cure a hangover.”

“Remember that coma I was in?” she throws it away, hopes the sound of it hitting something close by means it made contact with Wells. Clarke sits up, reaches behind her back to stop her shoulder from hurting, then blinks. “This is so much worse than that.”

Obviously it’s not true. Once the hangover is gone, she’ll remember that again. But for now, she’ll keep being naïve.

“Want a piggyback?” Wells is hanging over their beds, elbows balanced on Raven’s bedframe as he smirks to her.

“Piss off,” Raven grumbles again from above before she throws herself down, skipping past the ladder.

“We should have let Roan find ‘em,”- That must be to Murphy again.

Clarke sighs and sits up against the wall then realizes she can’t hold her head up for long and so slumps it on to Murphy’s shoulder like she did the other night. Him on top of the blanket, her beneath it, they just wait and listen to the other two.

“We’re his favorites,” Raven waves a hand dismissively and then sprawls out along Clarke’s bed instead, legs flung over the both of them and head landing on to the space where the pillow should be.

“Not when he finds out about your blood-alcohol levels,”

“Ah yeah, I forgot I’m scheduled in for a fucking blood test?” she mumbles sarcastically.

“Shower,” Wells grins, hand still on his head. “Be down at the Dropship for nine or we’re eating without you.”

They both leave after that, Murphy standing up a little reluctantly and swaying for a moment before he follows Wells out of the door. Raven throws her shoe to the back of it, just for the sake of it.

She crashes her head back on to the mattress, nose first, and Clarke huffs again.

“Come on. We’ve got orders,”

“You go. Wells can suck my dick,”

Clarke glances at her, amusedly.

“If you throw up in my bed, we’re switching,”

“I’m not an amateur, Griffin,” she growls back and then her snores start to radiate throughout the room as though they never stopped.

Clarke’s smile is fond but subtle as she pulls her legs awkwardly out from under the blanket. She tiptoes around for a towel, a spare change of clothes since she slept in the same ones she’d been wearing last night, so that she won’t have to dig for them once she’s out.

Everyone will be eating around now. Nobody else will be showering.

“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she says, taking her shirt and pants off, leaving on her underwear because she can leave them with her towel while she showers.

Raven doesn’t respond, out cold for as long as she can get, and so Clarke steps out with a towel wrapped and tightened over her chest.

The shower room is just a few doors down, and she gets in there within seconds, slips into the furthest stall along and turns the water on.

It runs cold, as it always does at first. Slowly it’ll warm up, and that means it’ll reach around the same temperature of this room. That’s okay though; the cold is something Clarke needs right about now. It’s a good wake up call.

She feels grimy just from the haziness of last night and when the pathetic spray of running water lands on to the tips of her toes, that starts to fade.

It cleanses her, reminds her of rivers and streams that were just too cold to function. She watches as her toe drowns in the puddle starting to form, just at the edge of the drain, and something flashes back like a snapshot. Like a polaroid, the space underneath the stilled, captured memory room for the words spoken.

A sneaker, hanging off a ledge in the place where her bare foot should be. A shoe can’t feel like it’s being watched, right? This does.

She brushes it away. Last night is all one big blur, this might have morphed into her dream. Maybe she dreamt of falling again. Maybe she got lucky last night and had another dream of peace.

It hurts to look at her feet. Clarke just steps closer into the water, needs to feel that numbing all over. She hangs her head back to get the hair wet, to soothe the warm, trickling stone that has resided to the back of her skull. Her neck cranes and her eyes catch on the patch of damp at one of the edges of the ceiling.

She doesn’t see mold, she sees stars. She sees limitless constellations that have all melted into nothing. It hurts to look at that too. Though that polaroid isn’t blank this time.

_‘“Salvation maybe,” voice rigid, casual. “People used to pray to the stars.”’_

Not her voice, but she can’t hear those words. She reads them.

Clarke looks away from the ceiling too.

Instead, she closes her eyes, tilts her face back even further so that she can drink up the water, let it fall on to heavy eyelids, let it drip down from the tip of her nose, let it rain through the space between her teeth.

She brings a hand, shaking only slightly from the cold, to the back of her neck. Once Clarke feels skin against skin, a layer of wetness between the two, something rushes through her veins. The knowledge that she shouldn’t stop.

Clarke moves the tips of her fingers down, around her throat, clutches at it momentarily just to see if her hand will wrap all the way around it, and then down to her shoulder. She rubs the water into the skin with her thumb and then steps back some more so that the water flows down her chest too.

It streams down through the valley between her breasts and she watches it as it travels. Her hand follows and her ring finger trails along the same river, pointed but cautious.

_‘“Monsters don’t just live under beds anymore, Princess,”’_

Her hand stills, just as she sees every single part of her do the same thing. Frozen in more than just a photo.

She pushes it away.

Clarke goes back to drinking the water in because she wants to remove that vile taste of last night from her mouth. It lives all the way at the back of her throat and might just extend to her stomach, which is certainly flipping and revolving as she stands; warning.

_‘“Do you believe it?”’_

Believe what?

Her eyes clench shut, tighter and tighter as she just wills it all away. If she can’t remember everything then she doesn’t want to remember anything.

The pattering of the drops that miss her body echo throughout the room, turning it into an arena.

Clarke’s finger curves up around the swell of her breast and comes to rest tentatively over the cage that her heart is in, tapping once and then twice just… to check.

_‘“You were a good man,”’_

It doesn’t make sense. She’s wasting water. Clarke hurries through washing the rest of her body, scrubbing maybe a little too hard to get rid of that grime. She runs her hands through her hair, up through the back of her scalp to try to massage the dead weight away from it. Nails catch on that stitched up wound, but she doesn’t shy away from it like she usually does.

Here, under the protection of a rotting faucet, Clarke explores her scar. The one she can’t see.

_‘“After I abandoned you?”’_

She wonders if all of that hair on her head is doing any sort of work to cover this up. It must do, from the way it feels buried.

It feels smaller than she thought it might.

The wound on her hand makes contact to the one on her head and, although it might be weird, Clarke leaves it there to rest. These cuts, they are what she became for so long. They were a team. Dead skin meets dead skin, and neither are normal but neither of them are deadly anymore. Neither of them are trying to kill her. They just are what they are. They’re memories and they’re scars.

Clarke turns the handle, rusted and ready to snap off, and wraps her towel under her arms as she wrings her hair out. She unlocks the door, turns out of it, and relishes in the silence of the room.

She doesn’t do what she’s done every time she’s showered. There is a row of sinks, three or four (she’s never stopped for too long to count them), and above them sit mirrors.

Clarke can’t remember the last time she looked into a mirror, and the thought of it has daunted her ever since she woke up. She fled past them each time she had to but today, she slows down.

And Clarke turns toward them, steps forward just a little with closed eyes. She repeats the shuffled footsteps until her stomach hits one of the sinks and she just knows it’s time to be brave again.

Whatever she looks like, if she doesn’t look like her, she can deal with that.

She hasn’t cried yet, and she won’t do that now either, but bright blue eyes flash open when hers do, wide and wet; filled. Learning them for as long as it takes to capture them again, Clarke holds her breath. Those are her eyes and they aren’t deadened or grey.

They roam down, cascading like a wave, to lips that are still pink. Chewed up a little, to the point they are flaking away. They aren’t pretty, but they’re hers. There’s a beauty spot where one has always been. Her eyebrows are still too rounded to be beautiful.

Her cheekbones stick out a little more than they used to; gaunt in a way, but nowhere near as bad as she was expecting. Her hair is darker than blonde but that could just be from the water still clinging to it. Those are still her curls and they might be longer now, might not frame her face as well as they did when she could style them, but they are still hers.

The bones around her collar are more accentuated. The skin is tighter because she’s lost so much weight.

She lets out the breath she’d been holding inside when her eyes meet the woman in the mirror’s. They are threatening to spill over, but Clarke knows that they won’t in the same way she knows everything else about these eyes. Knows the depths behind them, how much they can hold.

The breath is shaky and choked and sounds an awful lot like she’s about to start crying. Maybe she should.

Maybe if she lets the tears go too, then this will be another step towards healing.

Clarke doesn’t get the chance to make that decision. It gets made for her. The door, these unfairly heavy doors, swings open and she doesn’t snap around towards it because she doesn’t have to. She can see perfectly well who just walked in through her reflection and instead, her hands snap to the edges of her towel to make sure it’s going to stay there.

He walks in, towel hanging low on his waist, one hand itching the back of his head as he yawns. Clarke watches Bellamy find her. He stills in his path along the opposite wall and his expression settles in the way it always does when he looks at her now.

Bellamy doesn’t hesitate to meet her eyes and Clarke doesn’t try to take away the tears gathering at the corners of them. They aren’t going to fall. He can watch as she holds them up.

She wonders if he sees the blue that she does. If he can read her own eyes as well as she can.

_‘“I hate you,”’_

Bellamy raises an eyebrow, just an eyebrow and Clarke knows exactly the question he’s asking.

‘Can you remember?’

Her fingers clutch tighter to the towel and she doesn’t know what to say.

She doesn’t remember everything, and doesn’t that make all of it moot? If she can’t follow the memory of a conversation, then is any of it actually there?

_‘“Good”’_

She breathes once more, because she’s forgotten to do that again, and it comes out just as shaky as the first one did.

‘Can you, Bellamy?’ she challenges with a raised eyebrow of her own. 

And he smiles. Not happily or anything. He smiles apologetically and pictures of that flood back through her. He smiles like he’s trying to bite down on it and Clarke wonders when the last time he actually _smiled_ was.

And this smile makes Clarke think that he never wanted any of this to happen at all. This smile is full of regret and remorse.

She spins on her heels and marches up towards him, not caring if they’re both almost naked because sober Clarke doesn’t have the peace that drunk Clarke did. She never has. Not in comparison to that night in the cottage and certainly not in comparison to last night when she gave Bellamy her time.

She doesn’t need to shove past him in order to get out of the room, but she does. She collides with his bare shoulder and the muscle is still hard and tense but so is hers. He doesn’t move or falter, because he’s been expecting it all along, but Clarke keeps barreling forward and she doesn’t look back when she lets the door slam.

 

…

 

Clarke notices when he doesn’t come to the team meeting; they all do. No one really mentions it, and they don’t have a reason to. They don’t have a clue about the run-ins she’s been having with him. They don’t know how steadily bitter she’s becoming about it all.

Echo is here, scowling like she always is. Octavia isn’t. Clarke doesn’t know if it was ever jealousy that she bore for Echo, if it ever reached that limit. For jealousy to be jealousy, surely there needs to be something to see, something to become jealous of. The whole problem was Clarke never knew anything. Nonetheless, for some reason, that fire feels colder now.

The Blakes are the only two who aren’t in this room, they’re probably on watch. Someone has to be, after all.

Roan is talking and Clarke should probably be listening, but she isn’t. She only really catches the end.

“…Miller, Murphy and Griffin, we’re out by nine. Suit up,”

Shit.

She snaps her head over to Murphy, who has his eyes closed like he’s frustrated. It’s Wells who saves her from embarrassment. He’s acting more sober than the rest of them combined, and frankly, if he weren’t so goddamn helpful, Clarke would be pissed off.

He tells her that they’re on a civilian recovery. They’ve had a distress call, apparently, from upstairs that came all the way from Minnesota. It clicks in her head immediately, why Murphy looks pained. She looks over to Raven, but she hasn’t had any sort of reaction to the news, so the prat mustn’t have told her, still after all of this time.

Clarke hesitates for a moment to reach out in front of all these people, and it’s not like either of them are exactly tactile. Still, the quickest way to get to Minnesota is going to be through North Dakota and he knew that the second it was said. Clarke puts her hand on to his shoulder and he flinches away from it.

He opens his eyes and looks to her, sees that she understands that this will be painful, and she can’t even bring herself to be nervous about being thrust back into the wasteland because he’ll need her on this. She nods her head. Says ‘I’ll be there,’ with it, and he nods back, face blank.

“We’ll be gone for a week, maybe more,” Wells says almost hesitantly.

“We?”

“You didn’t hear him say Jaha?”

She looks over to Raven again.

“You’re gonna be on your own for a week?” Clarke asks, voice quietening.

Raven just shrugs, her face wearing a grimace that makes her seem like she doesn’t mind all too much. Clarke obviously knows better.

“I’ll annoy Jasper and Monty for a few days. I can steal some more moonshine, it’ll be fine,” she pauses. “Plus, I’d rather not spend a week with Bellamy Blake if I can help it.”

“What?”

“Six of us, Clarke,” Wells says as a reminder. “Him, Miller and Roan are the other three.”

Of course they are.

“You can take my pack,” Raven offers, moving past it as though it’s nothing. Maybe it is nothing. “Saves you having to get your own for now.”

“Thanks,”

So, Roan must think she’s ready. She doesn’t look dead, to be fair. She looks like she can hold herself up now. But spending a week in close quarters with the man who broke her heart… perhaps not.

Roan is still in the room, lingering as he speaks with Echo and Niylah privately. Clarke pushes off of the counter top and walks over to him, waits a few feet away, bouncing on the tips of her toes tentatively.

When the other two head in the other direction, Roan turns around like he knows exactly what Clarke wants.

She narrows her eyes.

“What are you trying to do?” she asks suspiciously, voice lowered in the cluttered room.

“It’s a job, Angel. One that you signed up for,”

This is him in leader-mode. The only hint of familiarity is that stupid nickname. And what he says isn’t even technically true. She was on the list of Ark members before she so much as found out about it.

“You’re fit enough and the people on your watches have said your shooting is impeccable,”

But she only had to shoot twice. Once with Bellamy and once with Jackson.

“Wells was right though. Right now, it might be a hazard,”

She hopes that’s enough for him to get what she’s talking about and it is. He narrows his eyes too and steps forward.

“Griffin, you do realize there are people stuck out there who need our help, right? We don’t have time for soap operas,”

Right. Selfish. She’s being selfish.

Her head drops down to her feet and she bites her lip shamefully. He doesn’t take pity on her, but the simple reminder seems to be enough of the tough-love, because he steps forward again and slaps Clarke on the shoulder.

“Come on, go get ready,” and then he’s spinning her back around to face the three on top of the counter and with the slightest shove in that direction, she’s stumbling forward. “And Griffin?” he calls, and she turns back. “Tell Murphy to get some sleep before we set out. The guy looks like shit.”

 

…

 

Clarke thought that the smartest thing to do with the few hours she’s got before heading out would be to get some more rest. She won’t have a bed for a week, and she was tucked up in one for four months.

Wells has other ideas though.

“You should go and say goodbye to Abby,” he tells her as they head away from the rec room. “She’ll be hurt if you leave without saying anything.”

Clarke snorts.

“Hurt?”

“Cut her some slack. She’s practically held this place together,”

“Fine. You want to come?” she offers, and he raises his eyebrows in surprise.

“You want me there?”

“You should say goodbye too,” and if there’s another selfish reason, a part of Clarke that tells her that she’d rather he just be with her when she faces her mother, she ignores it.

It’s an awkward farewell. Clarke and Wells hover at the entrance to the med ward, leaning on opposite sides of the doorway until Abby finishes up with a kid who’s broken his arm. She hastens over to the both of them, the bags heavy under her eyes and the fly-aways of her bun much more frequent than they ever would have been before.

“Clarke,” she says, exhaustion in her voice.

Sometimes Clarke forgets that she isn’t just a doctor here. She’s got twice as many responsibilities as anyone else.

“We’re leaving tonight. We won’t be back for a week. Probably longer,” she adds it as a warning but also as a mercy.

Abby’s reaction is a surprise. She smiles tightly.

“Good. It’ll be good for you to get out,”

“Yeah,” Clarke says, a little rattled. “It will.”

She hadn’t thought that her mother would be able to catch on to how much she’s hated being stuck here. She’s a smart woman though; Clarke should have known.

“You take care of each other,” Abby says, glancing between her and Wells with an unreadable expression on her face.

“Of course,” Wells glances over to Clarke and raises an eyebrow. Her mother isn’t being uncharacteristically caring, but any sort of caring is strange coming from her. Now it’s just explicit.

“Bring him back,” she nods her head to Wells and Clarke thinks she’s trying to make a joke. “We’d be lost without him.”

Clarke doesn’t force a smile.

“I will,”

She steps closer to the both of them and then holds her arms out as a question. Clarke leans into them, awkwardly, and brings her hands around to Abby’s back. Her fingers scrunch up in Clarke’s t-shirt, tighter than necessary.

Abby lowers her voice and leans her chin on to Clarke’s shoulder.

“When you come back, I’d really like to talk,”

“What do you mean?” Clarke asks, pulling away.

“You’re still my daughter, Clarke. I know we haven’t always been-”

“When I get back,” she nods. “We’ll talk.”

 

…

 

The three of them leave Ark floor at twenty to nine; the sun hasn’t set yet, but it will soon. Hopefully they’ll get out before then. It’s a hot night, humid and uninviting. Clarke regrets not having another shower before she left, almost the second they leave the building.

“You’ve got something growing on your face,” she tells Murphy as they start to walk across the ‘drawbridge’ to the rover.

“Cute, Griffin,”

Wells chuckles between the two of them.

“Growing a beard is an accomplishment in terms of masculinity, you know,”

“It’s also a failure in terms of personal hygiene,”

“Have you seen your hair?” he asks, leaning behind Wells to tug at one of the strands he can reach. “There could be things living in it for all you know.”

“I think you look like a pirate,” Wells offers, hopefully.

So the little interwoven braids might not have been a good idea, thinking about vanity, but it’s the only way to keep it down.

“Gee, thanks,”

“She’s just jealous of my beard,”

Roan is there in the front seat of the rover when they reach it, fingers tapping patiently on the steering wheel.

He nods at them, mutters something about a briefing when everyone else gets here, and then Wells makes his way around to the back of it.

“Get in losers,” he calls when Clarke and Murphy lag behind to kick at each other’s shins. “We’re going shopping.”

The whole back wall of the rover opens out into two double doors and there are narrow benches that line the two sides leading up to the divide between this area and the driver’s seat.

“Cozy,” she hums and doesn’t wait around before she climbs in, scoots along to the end of one of the benches and takes her pack off, stuffing it down in between her legs.

Murphy follows, Wells takes the seat opposite.

Clarke can see Roan from where she’s sat, through the meshed, wired wall strung up. When the doors close, there won’t be light in here.

There is space along these benches for at least twelve people to sit down so at least they aren’t going to be shoved up against one another. There will be room to breathe.

Wells has left the doors open but they are facing the gates, so Clarke won’t get any warning before she sees Bellamy. She’s tried not to think about it today. She failed, obviously, and thought about literally nothing else apart from the fact that she’s going to be stuck in close proximity to him for a week, but that doesn’t mean she got anywhere with dealing with that information.

She’s wondered what his reaction might be to learning they’re going to have to do this. He might not even know who is on the team.

It might not even be Clarke he’s worried about. He did, after all, get into physical confrontations with both Wells and Murphy within the last month.

“I like it,” Murphy decides, a little too loudly for the enclosed space, eyeing Clarke like he knows exactly what she’s thinking. “I think it makes me look suave.”

“You don’t even know what suave means,” she snorts back, smile wobbling on her face. “And if you did, you would certainly not be using that word to describe that beard.”

He opens his mouth to reply but voices start to rise as they approach the rover, and Clarke closes her eyes in preparation. Bellamy and Miller jump into the rover with ease, both wearing eighty liter bags that look like they weigh nothing when they sit on their shoulders.

They’re mumbling to each other, but their voices have lowered since realizing there are other people here and Clarke tries to ignore them both. She catches her knee shaking in her fluttering vision but hopes no one else can.

Surprisingly, Bellamy takes a seat next to Wells and Miller sits next to Murphy. Neither of them acknowledge the three of them, but they haven’t gone out of their way to make the divide clear. It’s probably all a show for Roan, who hops in after them.

“Go on then Griffin,” Murphy probes, clearly trying to distract her from the burning silence. “What does it mean?”

“Charming, smooth,” she thinks. “You know, like Wells,”

When Clarke looks to him, her gaze sweeps over past Bellamy too, and the walls are close enough together for her to be able to see the way he’s biting on to his jaw, his eyes narrowed as though he’s blocking out pain.

She knows that might have been a low blow. He can deal with it.

Murphy scoffs.

“So it’s a class thing?” he nods, smug grin on his face like they aren’t in one of the most awkward situations yet. “Suave is just another word for rich.”

“Of course it’s not,” she smirks back and watches Wells so that she can still see Bellamy in her peripheral vision. She wants to catch his reaction. “I’ve met people who were brought up with practically no money and are still suave.”

She uses present tense and feels a sense of satisfaction when Bellamy’s eyes flick momentarily and cautiously over to her. She doesn’t meet them. She knows the question he’s asking and if he wants her to answer it, then he can voice it.

Of course she’s talking about him.

He doesn’t look smug or anything and that’s good because she’d be tempted to punch him if he did. He just looks reluctant.

Clarke startles when Miller speaks, not expecting it in the slightest, and she rips her eyes over to him to hear him.

“Will you two quit saying suave? It didn’t sound like a fucking word the first time you said it, let alone the tenth.”

Unlike all the other times that Clarke has had an interaction with him, this holds no lasting hostility. He says it as a groan, like a mother scolding her children. It’s not familiar but it’s also not bitter. Clarke’s throat jumps at the change.

“Then what would _you_ call my beard?” Murphy tries, ignoring Miller and turning on Clarke. “If it’s not suave.”

He just can’t help himself. It’s not like he needed to add that on, he just did it to annoy everyone and Miller throws his head back, groaning again. Clarke actually smiles that time and then notices Bellamy smiling too. Not the way he used to. But there’s a subtle turn in the corners of his lips, directed to his friend, and there is a second where they make eye contact, remnants of happiness on both their faces.

“A fucking disgrace,” she jumps to say, snorting again and brushing the strange second away.

They’re all sat too close to each other for her to properly ignore Bellamy’s expression, especially since he’s constantly in her view, and she watches as his smile grows imperceptibly. Enough to actually call it a smile, even if he’s still trying to contain it.

“And she called me suave,” Wells grins, unable to help himself either. Murphy rolls his eyes, but Clarke’s focus is still trained on trying to subtly pick up Bellamy’s reactions, hyperaware.

It’s not like his smile completely wipes away, but he runs his tongue over his teeth like he’s trying to wipe away a bad taste. He didn’t like that then.

“If you lot are done bickering, we have somewhere to be,” Roan sighs, sounding amused though, and like he’s reluctant to change the subject.

Wells ducks his head, never one to challenge authority.

“Mission’s simple. Head to Minnesota. There are three girls stuck in a hotel just south of St. Paul. Fuck knows how they’ve lasted this long but we’re gonna get them out of there. We don’t have time to stop for the nights so we’re driving non-stop. You can figure it out between yourselves who sleeps on the floor,”

He says it as though the floor isn’t an alright place to sleep. That’s because he didn’t have to live in the wild for six months.

“Angel, I never asked if you could drive stick,”

“I can,” she nods, and he raises his eyebrows, almost as though he doesn’t believe her.

She jumps for the third time when Bellamy speaks, and she swears that if they keep doing this, she’s going to have a heart attack before they even open the gates.

“She can,” he gruffs out, quiet, tense, clearly only speaking to Roan, but not quiet enough for anyone else to miss it.

Clarke feels Murphy’s shoulders tense up next to her, but she can’t say anything to him without everyone hearing.

“Great. Any questions?”

No one says anything and Roan mustn’t feel the need to add anything either because he turns and hops out of the rover.

One of the doors swings closed, and Roan moves over to shut the other one, but he sees something.

“We’re leaving,” he says to whoever is approaching, making it clear they shouldn’t be here.

“Obviously,” Clarke recognizes the bite of Echo’s voice. “I’m on watch. I came to say goodbye,”

It’s time for her own body to tense up. She looks straight down to her lap, fingers reaching on instinct to grab at an arrow, just to have something to distract herself with.

Bellamy stands to his feet slowly. Clarke doesn’t see anything but his boots as they hesitate to move for a moment, and then he’s slipping out of the rover and the sounds of their voices drift around it, as though moving away from the doors will mean they won’t be heard.

That conversation, out on the roof, she remembers saying Echo’s name vaguely. They might have talked about her. That’s something drunk Clarke wouldn’t have been too passive to do. But the conversation isn’t a conversation, in her head.

“So you say goodbye to your sister but not me,” Echo sounds tired, like she doesn’t actually care that much.

Clarke tries not to cling to their words but she’s petty. She almost laughs at the absurdity of what Echo says. Does she not realize how important Octavia is to him?

“I couldn’t find you,” Bellamy’s voice doesn’t come across as apologetic.

“Yeah, and I’m sure you really tried,”

“Can we do this later?”

“No, Bellamy. We’re doing this now because it’s always later with you.”

Clarke registers Roan shuffling around in the driver’s seat and Miller starts up a conversation with Wells to try to get over the awkwardness, but their voices are rising and they’re impossible to drown out.

“I’ve been patient with you, but it’s been two months and you’re still not letting me in,”

Two months. They’ve only been together for two months. That helps things, barely.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he sighs. Clarke can picture exactly what he’s doing: one hand scratching awkwardly at the back of his head, one hand on his hip to balance himself.

“I get that her being alive made problems but-”

“Don’t. Don’t say it like that.”

“But it’s not like she needs you. You shouldn’t force yourself to be unhappy just because of her,”

Roan raps impatiently at his window, setting a figurative timer for their conversation.

Wells raises his voice as he talks to Miller, clearly trying to stop everyone from hearing them. It’s irrelevant.

“You don’t know anything-” he says, dismissive but not giving anything else away.

“Because you won’t tell me anything,”

Roan knocks again, harder this time. Clarke notices there are bars strung up on the outside of the window and they remind her of a prison cell, but she understands why they’re there. If that glass gets broken then there’d be nothing else breaching the people on the inside from whatever lies outside.

“So stop pretending like you do,”

“She was important to you, I get that-”

“No, you don’t,”

Clarke is numb. That’s something she has to keep pushing to the forefront of her mind because if it isn’t there then she’s going to start hurting again.

“But I want to be important to you too,”

“I can’t give you what you want from me. I physically can’t, and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. I’ve told you this, Echo, I don’t want to,”

“I said I would wait,”

“And I said that was pointless. I thought you understood.”

Roan wraps on the window one last time.

“No I understand. What I don’t get is why you’re doing any of this if you’re so sure that you don’t want to fall out of-”

Roan’s door might have a dent in it once he’s finished pushing against the inside, patience gone as he yells out that they’ve got places to be.

Bellamy pulls himself up into the rover again and Clarke refuses to look at him. He closes the door and Roan starts the engine up.

She spins her arrow in her hand and it clutters to the floor.

She closes her eyes again.

There is a nudge at her shoulder, but it goes ignored because she’s balancing very, very unsteady on the edge.

“You’ll like this part,” Murphy hums.

They’re turning around to face the gates and Roan is reversing all the way to the edge of the building, she can see through the narrow slits in the doors.

The timing. It’s about the timing.

The next thing Clarke feels is the rush of wheels accelerating beneath her and then they’re racing forward towards closed gates and she barely catches Echo yanking on the lever. They’re going at sixty, verging on seventy, and they’re going to die if they hit that wall, but they don’t.

Clarke is leaning all of her weight on to Murphy thanks to the force pushing the rover forward, but she adjusts to it, enough to crane her eyes out through the mesh divide and the barred windows.

And they’re out.

 

…

 

Clarke figures out why they’ve predicted this to take a week pretty early on. They’ve got to take the same tactic that she did when she was driving the truck. The highways are still all blocked off. Wells explains that they’ve been making old maps as they go, crossing off all the roads that they reach and can’t get through.

It’s a smart idea and when they’re driving through Vancouver and the nearer states, it works pretty effectively because they don’t make any mistakes. Don’t drive into any traps. Miller mentions the fact that they haven’t been to Minnesota yet, which will be a cause for concern.

Once Clarke was sure her composure would remain intact, she went back to normal. Noticing that when Bellamy reclaimed a seat on the bench, he spaced himself pointedly away from Wells, she scoffed inwardly.

So much for the hope she’d had earlier.

The sun sets soon in and Wells offers to sit up front with Roan so that he can help with lookout. It’s fine in the day, Clarke learns, but the night reduces visibility from the sides.

Roan doesn’t use his indicators on any of the roads and his driving is more than a little reckless. Clarke can’t help but enjoy that.

Murphy takes Wells’ seat when they stop for the few seconds it takes him to jump out.

“How’s your head?” she whispers after a while of silence in the back.

“S’fine,” he grumbles and scowls. He’s never been very good with her mothering him.

“What happened to your head?” Miller asks, not sounding like he actually cares, but he’s making an effort to cut the awkwardness.

He hasn’t looked at Clarke like he wants to kill her yet. There’s still progress.

Murphy throws an amused smirk to Clarke, brief and knowing.

“One of Monty’s experiments,” he gives.

Clarke can’t find the smile that she’s looking for. She knows that she spoke with Bellamy last night, but she can’t remember all of it and he probably can. That means he’s got another thing over her.

Miller knows who Monty is. There’s a familiarity that washes over his expression. She wonders what they are to one another; whenever they’re in the same room, there’s no hint of a connection between them.

“We should sleep,” Bellamy says from the other side of the benches, literally as far away from Clarke as he can get. “No good wasting energy on chatting.”

“No,” Clarke nods to the floor. “Why on Earth would we do that?”

“Roan, you good to drive through the night?”

“I’ll kick one of you awake when I need to stop,”

The roof isn’t quite high enough for Clarke to stand up straight, so she has to duck her head uncomfortably when she rises.

“What are you doing?” Murphy asks.

“There’s barely room for one person to lie down on these benches, and I’m not tired. _He_ wants to sleep,” she says, nodding her head over to Bellamy who is sorting through his pack. “And you still look like shit.”

“Yeah, there’s no way you’re taking to floor,”

“Why not?”

“Because…” _you’re the girl_.

He might not say it, but it’s there. And that pretty much makes her decision for her. She slips down between the two of them once her bow is off her back and settles in to use the pack as a cushion.

“Clarke,” Wells calls in, that no nonsense tone back.

“Snug,” she answers and closes her eyes.

There’s silence. No, there’s not even that anymore. There’s too many unspoken things hanging in the limited volume of the rover for there to be silence. There’s tension for a while and Clarke wonders what Bellamy is doing.

She can feel him peering over.

Then he stands and carries his own bag into the space between the doors and the edge of the benches, so that he can spread out width ways across the floor.

“Um, Griffin,” Miller starts, and he scratches at the buzzcut on his head. She looks up at him patiently and he’s avoiding meeting her eye. “Not to be _that_ guy, but you should really just-”

“You were in a fucking coma,” Bellamy snaps, loud enough to stun everyone inside the rover. Clarke freezes up and winces, only because no one can see it from down here.

He’s got his head down on his makeshift pillow, arms folded over his chest as he looks resolutely and defiantly up to the ceiling. _No salvation up there either, Bell_ , she wants to say. She doesn’t.

It’s the first time he’s actually spoken to her in front of anyone at all.

He sounds frustrated. Clarke hears more emotion in that than in the whole conversation he had with Echo, but to be fair, this isn’t across a wall.

And on the other hand, it’s across so much more than a fucking wall.

“Huh,” Murphy laughs. “Who knew?”

There’s that bitterness.

“Good to see you’ve caught up, Blake,”

The way he says it is all camaraderie, if only.

“I was just saying,” Bellamy growls back.

“Well don’t just say. We don’t need that from you,”

Murphy shuffles down on the bench as he says it, arm bending and palm tucking underneath his cheek, facing down to Clarke.

‘We’.

That’s a bullet that Clarke wishes she could shoot and jump in front of all at once.

Clarke feels Bellamy sit up and his eyes flick over her body for a moment. He’s trying to get her to look at him too.

“I thought we were done with nobility complexes,” he says, quieter.

She wants to smile and tell him that ‘complices’ sounds better. That’s what they would have done.

“I was never the noble one,” she answers instead, voice cold and she’s proud of that.

Miller is still sat awkwardly on the bench, hunched over with his elbows on his thighs as he debates whether he should push harder.

“Miller, I woke up a month ago. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel like I could hack it.”

He still looks cautious and glances hurriedly over to Bellamy, torn.

“Try having blood poisoning in January and sleeping in the middle of a highway,” she offers, not preaching. “I promise, this is nothing like that.”

Bellamy throws his head back down on to his pack, audibly, and Clarke ignores that too.

Miller makes his mind up, probably more tired of the debate than actually caring where Clarke sleeps, but she’s thankful anyway when he settles down, closer to the doors than to the front of the rover and starts snoring.

Clarke’s feet tingle with the knowledge that they are only a foot away from Bellamy, him perpendicular to her so they form a T-shape across the floor.

And of course she doesn’t actually fall asleep at any point through the night.

Once she realizes the actuality of having to sleep in a confined space with people who haven’t witnessed the violence of her nightmares, she also realizes that she can’t subject them to that.

She’ll wake everyone else up with the screaming. She’ll thrash around in the gap that is a third of the size of her bunk. And even without all of the practical excuses, she just can’t let them and _Bellamy_ know how scarred she is.

It’s a good thing she’s not on one of those benches. If she’d slept, she would have thrown herself off of it.

Bellamy’s breathing doesn’t even out in the night, not that she’s listening out for it. But once you’ve spent so many nights falling asleep in the arms of someone else, it becomes kind of hard not to learn what they sound like when they sleep.

And he isn’t sleeping either.

 

…

 

The next day comes and goes unremarkably.

Bellamy is in the driver’s seat by the time Clarke gives up on her fake-sleeping and Miller is next to him, both of them too busy bickering about the route to take to acknowledging the people in the back, or anything else.

Roan offers Clarke a dry bread roll; she takes it and tears it up into small pieces as she eats it. Murphy and her sit, leaning on the doors for most of the day, so that Wells and Roan can get some rest sprawled out on the benches.

It’s boring and she’s on constant hyperalert, watching out for a change in Bellamy’s character, but it doesn’t come.

He remains unaffected, distant and cold.

By the third day of this, as they’re settling in for another night, Clarke gives up on waiting for a reaction. His words to Echo play through her head on repeat; all just one big repetitive cycle as she tries to work it out.

Roan tells her that she should drive when they wake up on the fourth day. Murphy drove all through the third, with Wells at his side through the night, and she’d forgotten that he’d told her that he can drive stick.

His driving is chaotic, and he skips over speed bumps like they don’t exist at all, so when Clarke gets asked to take over, she jumps on the opportunity.

These walls, this tiny room, it’s getting smaller and smaller each day. It’s not like being out there, camping out in the middle of nowhere and falling asleep to the sounds of a river.

It’s safer than that, but it’s slightly maddening.

The changeover is a drill that must get practiced as often as possible in order for it to be efficient. The doors swing open, she’s told to be ready for an attack as she marches around the rover and Murphy takes the long way around so that they’ve got all four sides covered in case they’ve stopped in a bad area.

When she closes the door, shutting out the muggy air of a country road, Wells hasn’t moved, and he doesn’t look like he’s about to. He’s got a map and a pen in his hand, the lid between his teeth and darkened eyes but probably not as dark as hers are.

Driving is something she’ll never forget how to do. Even if she stalls a couple times within the first hour, Clarke soon recovers from that. It’s like riding a bike; once you know how to do it, you don’t lose that.

Without Wells sat next to her through the day, she’d have gotten them lost a hundred times over. They’re just past Idaho, heading into Montana and the day is all farms and wide open clearings, bordered by overgrown hedgerows.

It’s peaceful.

“Why haven’t we seen any walkers?” she asks, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel as she rounds a sharp corner, flicking the indicator back to neutral once she has.

“This is pretty normal,” Wells shrugs and she feels him looking over at her, curious. “You don’t get a lot out here anymore, not in these parts. With the rural areas, we get all or nothing. Some people haven’t even been touched by the infection and they’re still surviving, or you get parts that have been left to dust.”

“They can’t have just disappeared?”

“No. They find their way to the cities. They aren’t smart enough to realize there’s no one there anymore but they hear other ones and it’s just kind of… osmosis,”

“Osmosis works the other way,” she smirks, accelerates as they reach a long, straight stretch of road just for the sake of it.

“Fine. It’s gravity then,”

She pretends to consider.

“Yeah, okay, that works,”

“So pedantic,”

“But we’re heading to a city, right? Some people made it work there?”

“I think it’s more they just got caught there. Tried to stay in a hotel for a night, thinking it was safe, and then-” he breaks to yawn obnoxiously. “got cornered is the likely story,”

Clarke gives him a small smile.

“You should go get some sleep. You’ve been in that seat for like a day,”

“You need someone with you through the night,” he shrugs and points over to the sun which is hanging lower in the sky. It takes Clarke a moment to remember that she doesn’t have to use the sun to measure the time anymore; she’s got a watch.

She turns her head back to the mesh panel and looks through it to see who she can pick on.

Murphy is sound asleep on the floor at the back, face turned towards the doors, and Miller is sprawled out on one of the benches. Roan is sat at Miller’s feet with four different maps spread out around him across the floor. He’s got another in his lap and he’s doing something with a compass string, his face set and focused.

He’s probably doing something important.

Bellamy is hunched over, head in his hand, elbow balancing awkwardly on his thigh, a knife in the other hand and he’s throwing it up and twirling it in the air absent-mindedly.

He looks bored and he probably should be offering to help out with Roan’s work, but he’s focused on something else. His eyes are fixed on his hand, not even watching the path of the knife.

“Clarke!”

She’s drawn back to the road and her eyes practically pop out of her head when she sees the deer sprinting out, just fleeting and if Wells hadn’t alerted her to it, she might have thought she’s dreaming it.

She swerves, misses it by inches, then fixes her eyes on the road ahead, pulse quickening.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, hoping it wasn’t violent enough to wake anyone up. “Distracted.”

“Maybe _you_ should get some rest,”

“I’m fine,”

Something taps softly on the wired grating behind her, but Clarke doesn’t look to it, too rattled by the near-miss.

“I’ll take over,” Bellamy’s gruff voice floats through the net, destructive in its path.

“Left or right?” she asks Wells, ignoring him.

“Uh, right,”

He has to scrub at his eyes before answering and Clarke hits a palm against the steering wheel to make it clear she doesn’t think him staying up is a good idea.

“Go on, Wells, I’ll be fine on my own for a few hours,”

He hesitates. It’s five o’clock; they’ve got at least five or six hours until sunset and then she can just kick Murphy awake. He knows that too and the glare she sends his way cracks his resolve.

He puts his hand on her shoulder and squeezes softly. Clarke doesn’t turn into it, but she does lean her head a little. She can’t wait to have a bed back.

“Do not push yourself, Clarke. Falling asleep at the wheel is going to do none of us any good,”

She looks to both the wing mirrors and checks the sides as much as she can, decelerating slowly until they’re at a complete stop and that signals Wells’ chance to get out.

Someone throws the doors open as Wells gets out and as soon as she hears him clamber over Murphy, Clarke revs the engine again.

“Clarke!” Bellamy’s shout comes from outside and she slams her foot on to the brake.

The next thing she knows, he’s opening the passenger door and hauling himself into it, rough and in one swift movement, like he thinks she’ll drive off without him if he doesn’t hurry it.

Well, he’s not wrong. She did almost leave him.

She looks back into the main cargo space, just to make sure she’s not imagining the man sat to her right, but he’s not in there. Wells has taken his bench, already starting to snore to the ceiling.

“What are you doing?” she snaps, impatient and rightly so.

“What does it look like?”

He doesn’t say it with any bitterness or malice, and it makes her blood begin to boil.

She forces the rover forward, faster than before.

“I don’t need you up here,”

“Yes,” Bellamy sighs, like he hasn’t got time for this. “You do.” He reaches for the map that Wells has left to rest on the dashboard but Clarke swipes it before he has the chance and lets it fall to her lap. She has no idea where they are on it, but she won’t let him know that.

“You know, if you’re here, that means you’re gonna have to actually talk to me,” she whispers, mock-conspiratorially, leaning towards him with a sardonic smile on her face that isn’t even really there.

He sighs again, reaching for the map.

“I managed to figure that one out on my own, thanks,” he answers back, snatching it lightly from her lap, so light that she can tell he’s trying to avoid even touching her. “There’s a gas station around here that isn’t blocked up,” he straightens it out. “We should stop there.”

Roan mutters something in agreement and Clarke rolls her eyes, grip tightening on the steering wheel.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Did you come to see me fall?'  
> \- Weight of the World, The Kooks


	31. Fall of a thunderbolt waiting

Bellamy’s leg is bouncing up and down at a hundred miles an hour and he’s not even bothering to hide it as he unfolds the map even further and lays it out to the point where the edges are scraping along Clarke’s arm.

She ignores him when he starts to chew the end of a pen and considers driving in the opposite direction when he gives casual comments like ‘there’s a dead end up there,’ or ‘you can take the dirt road for a while,’.

Instead, Clarke stays silent and doesn’t think about how close their arms are to brushing or how they’re seeing exactly the same thing through the barred wind screen.

His breathing is quiet but steady and he seems comfortable, would be pulling ease off if it weren’t for his clamped jaw and the unsteadiness of his scrawls.

“You can drive stick now,” she says, calmly after about an hour. He almost goes flying out of his seat at the shock her voice gives him. The map makes crinkling sounds as his body jumps and he waits until he’s gone back to stiff before he speaks.

“You taught me,” Bellamy answers, almost suspiciously.

She can feel him peering over but keeps her gaze fixed to the road ahead.

“You were shit,”

He laughs shallowly and Clarke senses his chest rise with it. She can picture that half smile on his face.

“On purpose,” is all he reasons, sounding reluctant to even give that much away.

Clarke sighs and taps her fingers against the steering wheel. She knows what he means: he’d stalled every time she took her hand away from his that day.

“Your turn,”

“What?”

“Funnily enough, I’m tired of radio silence,” she bites, and he looks out of his window. “If you’re sitting up here, we’re going to grow up and talk to one another.”

“Why do you even want that?” he mumbles back after a moment or two of consideration.

“Jesus, we don’t have to talk about anything that actually matters. Not everything has to be a big deal,”

He snaps his mouth closed, teeth clashing, and then he opens his mouth again, but no words come out.

“Forget it,” Clarke sighs and nods her head to the side harshly. “Which way?”

“Just… keep going,” he says quietly. “Straight.”

 

…

 

They reach the gas station that Bellamy was talking about after another hour. Roan is still the only one awake in the back, and the other three don’t look like they’re going to wake up any time soon. It’s pretty obvious who will have to head in. Opening those doors won’t be worth the risk if there are any walkers around.

Clarke parks the rover up and takes her bow from the dashboard, adjusting her quiver awkwardly on her back.

She looks around before doing anything else, but they aren’t facing the store adjoined to the gas pumps.

“In and out,” Roan says, tired and preoccupied with his work on the maps. She’s managed to figure he must be doing something to calculate the shortest routes, maybe trying to determine what roads might be open in Minnesota.

Bellamy grabs his gun from his feet and tucks it under his arm, hand stretching naturally as his fingers find the trigger. She hasn’t seen him shoot in so long.

Clarke tears herself away and reaches for the door handle, only to be cut off when a hand latches around her wrist, soft and cradling.

“I’ll go first. If the place is crawling, we can just leave,”

She considers Bellamy, notices how only his forearm is extended past the half-way point between them and waits for him to loosen his grip. She doesn’t want to admit that that’s a good idea, but she’s in the driver’s seat; she’ll be the first one who can pedal the gas in the case of an emergency.

Clarke nods her head, but his hand hesitates to leave hers. Warmth and tingles spreading from his hold in a matter of seconds and Clarke doesn’t want him to let go.

He opens his door and leans out of it, slipping away. His door closes shut with a soft click and Clarke wonders how long she should wait before he decides it’s safe to go in.

The next thing she knows, her own door is opening and he’s standing there, looking up to her.

Clarke jumps out wordlessly; he keeps his hand on the door, like he’s forgotten that she’s going to need room to actually step down, and she ends up brushing her shoulder across his chest. It’s contact that wouldn’t have meant anything to either of them before, but they both tense up when it happens now.

Ignoring it, they press forward, and walk towards the store in silence. Clarke loads her bow along the way, glancing all around because she had to do this for such a long period of time, it’s not hard to remember the feeling of survival constantly being on the line.

She’s thrown by the normalcy of this: just her and Bellamy again, in a place where they can pretend that they’re the only people left in the world. She wonders if he can feel it too.

Clarke needs to keep reminding herself that she hates him, especially when he kicks the door in and moves forward to make sure the place is empty, rolling in alpha male energy.

“I’ll go find gas,” he says lowly, almost whispering as he leans into her. “If you want to keep watch?”

Bellamy waits for Clarke to nod her head and then he’s disappearing into aisles and she watches as he raises a hand up to his head, scrunches a fistful of hair tightly when he must think that she can’t see him.

He crosses over to the other side of the room and reaches a white door with all sorts of advertisements over it, posters stacked over older ones as the salesmen must have not bothered to take expired ones down. Bellamy opens it and ducks his head inside; storeroom, or staffroom she remembers.

She taught him that trick.

Clarke gets so caught up in trailing Bellamy, that it takes her a foolish amount of time to hear the breathing. Her head snaps to the counter in the corner, the one placed next to a wall of window, or what used to be window. Now it’s just a frame of shards that leave a gaping wound in the integrity of this building.

Clarke steps towards it, bow raising. She reaches it and still sees nothing, but there is a high-pitched, ragged hyperventilating coming from somewhere.

“Hello?” she calls, deciding it might be best to bring the walker to her, and then it’s lost the element of surprise.

But nothing shoots out.

“I’m clean,” she says next. There’s still no response.

She waits another couple of seconds, to the point where she’s forced to consider that there might really be nothing there. She could just be imagining the sounds of a survivor, but then there’s the barest hint of a whimper, almost like it’s being released into a hand.

Rounding the side of the counter, Clarke sees nothing on the floor behind it, where a worker might stand. She’s about to turn away when she catches the tip of a sandal peeking out from underneath the counter.

It’s a small shoe, meant for a child no older than twelve.

Clarke casts one more glance around the store and to the parking lot before she crouches down slowly and ducks her head.

There is a little girl scrunched up all the way against the furthest wall, beneath the glass-less window, one hand gripping tight to the legs that have been brought up to her chest, the other secure over her mouth. Her eyes are wide, brown irises that would be pretty if not for the terror in them.

She’s watching Clarke with panic, wincing, like she’s about to start crying.

“Hi,” Clarke whispers and doesn’t try to move closer. The girl squirms and kicks at the floor to get away but she’s already pressed tight against the end. “I won’t hurt you.”

She slows a bit, but still looks frightened.

Clarke takes another step forward, still crouched and leaning on to her knees.

“My name is Clarke. What’s yours?”

The girl hesitates, eyes still crying out for help, and her hand is pinching at her cheek as she wills her lips to stay shut. Nonetheless, Clarke still catches the small squeak she makes.

“Charlotte,”

“Hi Charlotte,” she smiles and moves closer but the girl whimpers again and folds up even smaller. “Are you by yourself?”

She’s hesitant to answer then, eventually, she nods her head minutely.

“Well I’m not. I’ve got friends just over there and we have a safe place,” she points out into the lot over to the rover.

“Safe?” Charlotte mumbles into her palm, her hand starting to fall slack just a bit.

“Yeah. If you need one, you can come with us,”

She’s got a shovel down at her side.

The offer seems to open something up and Charlotte relaxes ever so slightly. She comes out from under the counter but stays on the floor, like she hasn’t stood up in a long time.

“Are you-” Clarke tries, unable to figure out how best to ask it without making it sound like there can only really be one answer. “Have you been bitten?”

Charlotte watches her, chews her lip nervously as she considers Clarke. Shaking her head, a little wobbly, but still an answer, the girl opens up a little more, enough for Clarke to know that she isn’t feared.

“Clarke!” The sounds of Bellamy’s boots clashing against the floor are enough to shake it as he comes running out of the attached room. “Clarke!”

She’s forgotten that he can’t see her, that she’s hidden by the half-raised wall. His voice rings out raw and more frightened than the girl in front of her.

“Clarke!”

She stands to her feet and he’s leaning through the empty doorway, craning his head out to look for something. To look for her.

“Stop fucking shouting,” she snaps and ignores the part of her that melts when she sees his face; the epitome of fear.

For a second, just one, his expression washes over in relief as he spins back to see her, and then it retrains itself. Even colder than before.

“You could have said something,” he marches forward, hand coming to rest on top of the counter as though to brace himself. His voice is still hoarse, but hard now.

She snarls, in a way that she shouldn’t, and cocks her head to the side.

“So could you,”

Another low blow. He knows exactly what she’s talking about.

“Jesus Clarke, I thought something happened to you,”

It’s not anger. There’s emotion enough, but it’s not anger. There is some form of accusation there though, something in his frustration that says, ‘How could you expect me to not react like that?’.

“And?”

Because he’s tried so hard to enforce the fact that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t get to feel entitled now.

“And I was worried,” he bites, face breaking into incredulity. As though she’s being ridiculous.

Something tugs at her sleeve and Clarke is broken away from this, whatever this is, and she looks back down to Charlotte, who has scooted forward to clutch at Clarke’s leg with her feet.

Clarke ducks back down, as a wave of guilt floods over her. This is what happens with Bellamy: he makes her forget about everything else, makes all of everything into statistics and afterthought.

Bellamy must see the girl as Clarke leans an arm to wrap under her shoulders, bringing her up to standing. She has to take most of her weight, and she feels weak. No older than eight, maybe nine at a stretch.

“Relax, she said she’s clean,” Clarke snaps again when she takes in his suspicious glance.

“He’s your friend?” Charlotte asks, uncertain and rightly so, considering the hostility between the two of them. Clarke wants to scoff, but it’s too complicated. She has no idea what she is to Bellamy.

“He’s with me,” she goes for, hoping that’s concrete enough. It tastes like a lie and she knows that he catches that too; he sees her discomfort with saying it.

“I’m Bellamy,” he says, shaking himself out of his frustration and lowering down on the counter, leaning across it so he can talk to the girl. His face softens along with his voice. “Sorry for shouting. I didn’t mean to scare you,”

“Why are you here?” Charlotte questions, head flicking between the two of them as she leans on Clarke. She stinks. She probably hasn’t showered or washed in months. Her teeth are browning.

“We were passing through on our way to help some more people,” Bellamy hastens to tell her, and Clarke is drawn to him, his ease with children. He’s down on her level, arms reaching across the counter warmly. “How long have you been on your own?”

“I found a woman and she brought me here. She left a couple days ago to go get some help,”

“Where is she now?”

Charlotte shrugs nervously.

“She didn’t come back,”

He looks to Clarke for a moment and she gets caught watching him. Both of them drop their heads; both of them embarrassed by the ease they’ve fallen into of just _looking_ to one another.

“Okay,” Bellamy says, reaching a little more to reassure her. “Me and Clarke are gonna go just over there and have a talk. You stay here and you shout us if you see anything dodgy, got it?”

The girl still looks anxious, but Bellamy is inviting and there’s something about the way he says it that makes even Clarke feel confident that he’ll be sure to come back. And that’s saying something.

She startles after the few seconds it takes her to realize that he means she should be following him over to the other side of the store, and rushes to get Charlotte leaning comfortably on the counter, smiling as hopefully as she can before stalking off after him.

He spins on his heels when they become buried in an aisle, barren and scattered with broken glass; brown like that of beer bottles or Charlotte’s eyes.

Clarke almost crashes into his shoulder thanks to his abrupt stop but she catches herself just in time. He leans in close to lower his voice and she definitely doesn’t shiver, just faces him head on.

“We can’t leave her here,” he decides, brow pulled tight.

“Yeah, no shit Sherlock,”

“Clarke,”

“We’ll make room for her. This is a rescue mission, right? That means we get people out of places like this,”

“And the hotel? What do we do with her when we have to drive into a place filled with walkers?”

“We’ll figure that bit out when we get there,” Clarke says, not having thought that far ahead. There’s only really one thing they can do right now.

“Here,” he says and holds up a leather jacket that might have been black once upon a time. Now it’s covered in dust and grime and it’s faded to a dingy gray color.

“What?”

He’s clearly gesturing for Clarke to take it, but she has no idea what he expects her to do with it.

“Pockets,” is all he answers with before he’s shoving it into her chest, insidiously light, and he’s marching back over to Charlotte.

Bellamy carries her out of the store and Clarke is forced to actually wear the revolting jacket so that she can load her bow and keep watch when they head out. There is silence for as far as they can hear but she stays ready nonetheless as he raps against the back of the rover and waits for the doors to fly open.

“What the fuck?” Roan asks when he sees the kid in Bellamy’s arms. She bristles against him, wraps her arms tighter around his neck.

“We’ll explain,” Bellamy says, already hopping into the rover and kicking Miller awake harshly to get her down on to a bench. Clarke stays on the outside and turns her back to the lot of them so that she can keep an eye out. “But she couldn’t stay there.”

There’s a finality to his voice and suddenly Roan may as well be his follower.

“Miller get her something to drink,” Roan sighs and Clarke hears one of the doors close from behind her.

She takes it as her signal to get the rover moving again so she hustles around the side of it, opening the door and hopping up into the seat as she shoves the arrow away. Bellamy is sliding back into the seat next to hers before she even has the engine started and Clarke would question that if she didn’t have a job to do.

“Okay,” Roan says as Clarke is pulling out of the gas station. “One of you better tell me-”

“What’s there to tell?” she asks, glancing in the mirror to check what they’re doing. “She was alone and unprotected. What did you expect us to do?”

Roan ignores her bite and she sees people moving around in the back.

“Shit,” Wells mumbles. “She’s burning up.”

“Dehydrated?” Clarke offers but doesn’t get an answer.

She’d be angry about the fact he’s awake again already if he weren’t the only medic they have. That girl needs a medic for sure.

“She has a name,” Bellamy turns around to snap at Wells and Clarke scowls at him until he faces the barred windscreen again.

She hears some mumbling between Charlotte and Wells, his soft reassurances filling the enclosed space as he checks her over to the extent that she’ll allow. Charlotte was wearing a pink t-shirt, black leggings and a much too large brown hoodie so Clarke tells them to dig some clothes out of her pack for her to change into.

They’ll be too big, but they’ll be clean and the clothes the girl is wearing now smell like they haven’t been changed for at least a couple months.

It’s probably a good thing that Murphy is still asleep in the corner; all of the kids at the Ark are terrified of him so he probably wouldn’t be doing this situation any favors.

Bellamy grabs the map again to guide Clarke but his focus remains on Charlotte for the next hour, tracking every move Roan and Wells make to help her and eventually, after giving her some food and something to drink, she’s laying out on one of the benches with both hands tucked under her head and braided hair tickling her face as she sleeps soundly.

Miller has gone back to sleep and once Clarke has reminded Wells that he should be doing the same, they’re left alone with Roan at the wired divide.

“What were you two thinking?” he whispers as the sun starts to set.

“What do you mean?”

“She could have been dangerous. You can’t just trust the first person you meet,” he warns, and Clarke actually feels herself smile at the ridiculousness of that. She thinks all the way back to when she first got stuck with the Blakes, how quick she was to resent them. She quirks her eyes over to Bellamy, just to see if he’s thinking the same thing, and his smirk back to her is knowing. Only for the second it takes him to remember that they aren’t there anymore, and it fades back to nostalgic, and then even further back to nothing.

“She was unarmed and she needed help,” Bellamy says tiredly. “I honestly don’t know what else we should have done.”

Roan considers this, hesitates for a moment, and must come up with no arguments because he sighs and heads back away into the compartment.

Clarke keeps both hands on the steering wheel and the sky starts to turn a pinkish rose color.

The familiar crinkling of awkward paper returns and Roan must have restarted on his route planning at the far end of the rover. She casts her eyes back and notices everything has gone back to how it was before, just with one more addition.

There is peace again in the back and she wants to banish it from here, but she can’t, because Bellamy’s directions aren’t hostile, and he doesn’t radiate stiffness.

Clarke relents to the tranquility of it all, of the blushed sky, because she gets so few moments like that now. It’d be a waste if she didn’t.

She’s got the leather jacket thrown over her legs and can’t help but wonder why he’s given it to her, but he said ‘pockets’ and she’ll wait until she can actually feel around inside until she asks.

“I’d forgotten how good you are with kids,” she says instead, hushed and slow, more to herself than to Bellamy.

His head snaps to her but she doesn’t turn to him, keeping her eyes fixed to the blank road and the soft horizon.

He takes so long to reply that Clarke assumes he just isn’t going to. It’d be fine if he didn’t; it’d probably be safer.

But there isn’t really anyone to catch them out in this moment. Roan has made it clear he doesn’t care about the drama between them all, and the others are all making melodies with their snores.

And when it’s just the two of them, Bellamy still seems to relax in the same way he used to. Maybe ‘relax’ isn’t the right word for it, because he isn’t relaxed.

He just kind of… surrenders for that short amount of time. It’s more of a reflex than an action. It feels unstoppable and Clarke knows that if he could control it, he’d still be cold and unforgiving in his address. But he isn’t.

“I’m not really,” she feels him shrug. There’s a pause as he considers carrying on. “The kids back at base all hate me.”

He doesn’t say it like he’s asking for sympathy. It’s just a fact, and that’s good because there’s no way Clarke would be giving him sympathy.

“They do?” she asks, a little surprised but more curious.

“Yeah,” he answers matter-of-factly. Another minute of silence. “Not you though.”

“What?”

“You’ve got yourself a little army going there,”

He sounds amused but Clarke doesn’t let herself look over at him so she can’t quite tell.

She knows that he doesn’t mean anything by his word choice, but she hates the idea of what these children have had to become. They shouldn’t have to be an army.

She lets the silence hover for a while, enough time for the sun to touch the skyline but it’s only breaking trees and shrubs and so it’s harmless.

Clarke doesn’t mean for the words to slip out, they just do. It’s him, the effect he has on her.

“It’s something I never thought about,” she admits as nothing more than a whisper. She doesn’t want anyone to overhear. “We never had to, you know? We just had the five of us and we were all adults. It was so easy to forget that everyone else on Earth went through the same shit we did.” She can feel his gaze on her again: hesitant and analyzing but not threatening. “Those kids… to survive when you’re small and innocent…”

Must be so much harder.

“They aren’t,” Bellamy says, gentle.

“But they should be. They should be going to school and learning and feeding their homework to their dogs just to get out of it,”

“You didn’t do that,”

Not an accusation, and it should hurt that he’s smiling about knowing her so well, but he does know her this well and it’d be stupid to pretend he doesn’t.

“Of course not,” she waves a hand. “But they should be climbing trees and spitting loogies over bridges.”

“You didn’t do that,” he points out, almost as a reminder again, and she can hear his grin. Clarke likes that he’s smiling.

“I know,” she thinks again. “But… they should be stealing cigarettes from their mom’s purse and they should be able to run away and find a place to smoke them without the threat of-”

“You didn’t do that either,” he says like he can’t help himself, almost fondly outraged and very almost laughing.

“Of course I didn’t!” she bursts, hand slapping the steering wheel but it’s a good kind of frustration. It’s teasing. “But that’s not the point,”

He’s quiet for another moment and Clarke reckons he’s genuinely considering what she was trying to say.

His voice goes sober when he replies, serious again.

“I know what you mean Clarke. They deserve more,”

It doesn’t feel like she’s fighting herself when she turns to him and sees him looking out of his barred window.

“Why do they hate you?” she asks after she’s left that to settle in for a while.

Bellamy glances over and sends her a side-eye that she can only read as a bit of a warning, like she should know that this is a subject that they can’t breach. He looks down to his lap, finds their place across the scrawled out city but she sees him chewing the inside of his mouth.

Clarke thinks back to what she’d told him earlier; the ultimatum she’d given him.

“Well the sun’s about to set so if you want to get into the back then-”

“I’ll stay,” he shrugs to the map, innocently, purposefully ignorant.

“Then why do they hate you?”

He sighs, exasperated, and meets her eye again just for a moment. The spark of electric that crosses between the contact almost transfers something like a cry for help, a pleading of ‘don’t make me answer you,’ but then he snaps his head to the side again, follows the shrubs as they flash by like a zoetrope and the message isn’t strong enough.

She waits another year for an answer but eventually he relents, breathes coolly to the glass like he’s releasing something valuable.

“Because they love you,” he mumbles.

And it sinks like a brick. They’d made it so far without mentioning what he did but so far has a limit. They hate him because they know he broke her heart. The fight between him and Wells must have been enough of a show to let everyone know that.

“Oh,” is all she can say. “Sorry.”

She shouldn’t really be sorry, and maybe she isn’t. Still, it doesn’t quite seem fair.

Bellamy snorts, lacking in the good humor they’d been sharing only minutes ago.

“Don’t apologize,”

And so Clarke doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything else, not for hours. He keeps guiding her all through the night, but she doesn’t look at him and he doesn’t expect her to.

She can’t help but recognize the shade of pink the sky had turned. It was the same pink as her scars.

 

…

 

Bellamy reaches for the leather jacket in the early hours of the morning and Clarke lets him take it, vaguely curious about what he wanted.

He takes out a box of cigarettes and a lighter.

She watches, from the corner of her eye, as he takes one out with his teeth and then he turns the pack to her, and she counts the four that are inside. She was awful at smoking. She _is_ awful at smoking.

But it’s late and he rolls his window down with his other hand and she thinks, fuck it.

She rolls her own window down too before taking one and she holds it between her lips as Bellamy leans to light it. She keeps her eyes on the road and he keeps his eyes on the cigarette and it’s awkward but it’s close to him in a way that will always make her stomach quiver.

She coughs on the first inhale, as she knew she would, but Bellamy doesn’t react to it while he lights his own. It’s four-thirty and the sun will be coming back soon, and with that, the end of her stint at driving for the next day at least.

It’s a burning in her throat that has never felt good, or addictive, or necessary. Still, Clarke keeps smoking the damn thing. She likes watching the end of it, how it sort of devours itself, how the embers brighten whenever she takes another thing from it.

This is what she could become addicted to if she allowed herself to do so. The sight of the fire. And the smell of it is vaguely mesmerizing too. The only thing Clarke doesn’t like is the way it acts as a blockade in her windpipe.

She lets it balance between her index and middle finger as she goes back to gripping the steering wheel.

“I knew it,” she mumbles as Bellamy burns through half of his in one breath, reaching to flick at it outside the window like he’s done this a thousand times over. “I knew you smoked.”

“Only when we’re out,” he shrugs.

She breathes it in again and doesn’t choke this time.

“This shit will kill you,”

He doesn’t answer. The shadows do something as they pass over his face, but Clarke can’t figure out where they’re coming from.

“Here,” he says, hand diving into another pocket of the jacket. He takes out a small thing, it looks like a bundle of wires. She can’t make it out. “I’ve been looking-”

He cuts out but Clarke doesn’t have the patience for that.

“What?”

“I’ve been looking for one for a while,”

“What is it?” she asks, wary and not taking it even if he’s extended it past the gearshift.

“Just a- it’s an iPod. It’ll be dead for now but I figured-”

“Figured what?”

“You don’t sleep,” Bellamy sighs.

She hasn’t slept since they left and of course he’s noticed that.

“And?” she prompts, not quite able to find the point in denying it.

“And it could help,”

“I don’t need your help,”

“I know you don’t,”

“So why are-”

“Forget it,” he sighs once more, and Clarke wishes it could be easy to just look at him again.

She rolls her eyes and holds her hand out; palm flat like how she used to carry trays around in the diner.

“Give it here,”

He places it into her open hand and her fingers wrap and weave through the tangled earphones. They’re apple too, but the old style. The whole thing is pretty dated; an obnoxious hot pink color with one of those generic logo stickers smothering the back of it.

“This is stealing,” she reminds him, letting it fall into her quiver because she doesn’t really have anywhere else to put it for now. Clarke takes another drag of the cigarette and holds on to the taste of it.

He makes a sound, unapologetic. He understands that whoever owned that jacket before won’t be coming back for it.

She’s tempted to thank him.

She doesn’t. And he doesn’t ask for her gratitude because really, he knows just as well as Clarke does that she doesn’t owe him that.

 

…

 

The sun rises at around six in the morning and by that point, Clarke knows Murphy and Miller are awake too. It’s Roan and Miller who take over from the two of them. Charlotte is still crashed along one of the benches and Bellamy goes to her side straight away, slouching down with his head leaning back near her knees.

Clarke watches from the corner of her eye as he lets his eyes fall closed, almost as though he’s blocking out pain.

Murphy’s head snaps up when the two of them walk in through the back and his jaw drops. He’s taken the other bench and is fiddling with something on his gun. It feels strange to see him with a gun; he never had much of a use for one when he only had one hand.

Clarke sits down next to him, narrowly avoids stepping on Wells, who is asleep pressed up against the wall to the driver’s seat, and she bites her lip to keep from saying anything.

Murphy doesn’t seem to have that self-restraint.

“What the fuck?” he whispers, none too subtly, and he’s nodding his head all around so he’s probably asking ten different questions at once.

“I know,” Clarke sighs back, because she really doesn’t.

“Jesus Christ,” he focuses intently on Bellamy and narrows his eyes like he’s trying to figure something out. “You should have woken me up. I could have-”

“It’s fine,”

He moves to push forward but Clarke plucks at her bow string and waves a hand to stop him. Really, it’s not like it’s going to fix anything now.

Murphy hesitates.

“Who’s the kid?”

“We found her at the gas station,”

A moment of watching her, still skeptical.

“You look tired,”

“Charming,”

“Get some sleep,” he sighs, and Clarke doesn’t really know what else there is to do. She doesn’t lie down, feeling strangely vulnerable, and so she lets her head rest back against the wall and closes her eyes. It’s uncomfortable but it’s not like she was actually planning on sleeping.

It only takes moments for her to remember where they are. They’re about to cross the border into North Dakota; she’d figured that much out from her wary and brief glances to the map.

No wonder he’s acting way more jittery than normal.

“You’re doing okay, right?” she mumbles, cocking an eyebrow as she opens one of her eyes.

He looks unimpressed.

“Can we not?”

“I’m just asking,”

“You’re not just asking,”

She glares at him and he mirrors her expression with his head against the wall inches from hers, perhaps giving her a little more disinterest, or is that contempt?

“Clarke,” he warns and nudges her leg with his fist.

“Murphy,”

And he looks so cold that she’s worried he might just punch her if she tries any harder. He doesn’t punch her. He just shoves his hand at her face, forcing her head to turn the other way a lot like an older brother would do.

His palm is sweaty and doesn’t smell great and he hurts her nose a bit. She can’t help but recognize the gesture as something fond.

Clarke grins and he doesn’t look like he hates her and really, that’s the best she can get whenever they’re around other people anyway.

She’s about to let her eyes close again, about to try to convince her body that she’s sleeping when Charlotte stirs.

It’s an ugly sight, watching a kid wake up in an unfamiliar place and seeing the terror that comes with that up close and personal. Clarke shifts to move to her, to offer her a hand and any sort of comfort she might have to spare, but Bellamy is already there.

“Hey,” he mutters, soft. “It’s okay. You’re in a safe place,”

“Bellamy?” Charlotte asks, like she knows his name but like she’s trying to find where she remembers it from.

“We’re heading into North Dakota,” he tells her, and Clarke doesn’t really see the point in that, other than to make the girl feel like she’s more than just a helpless child. “And then we’re going to go to Minnesota but after that, we’ll get you to a base that’s clean. You’ll be looked after there,”

He moves a hand to hold Charlotte’s forearm and the whole thing fits easily in just his fist.

Charlotte sits up and Clarke sees an expression flit over her features, so barely-there that she’s probably just imagined it, and she doesn’t catch it for long enough to work out what it is.

“You don’t have to be alone,” Bellamy says as though he’s trying to convince her of something. Clarke wants to hear him say those words forever.

Murphy snorts.

“He thinks he can redeem himself by playing the hero again?”

“Murphy,” she sighs.

“Careful kid,” he leans forward, crossing his arms. “Don’t start trusting this one,” he nods over to Bellamy carelessly. “You’ll wake up tomorrow and he’ll be gone, just like that.”

“Murphy shut it,”

Clarke doesn’t kick him because she wants to spare Bellamy’s feelings; she does it to get through to him that this is the last thing Charlotte needs right now. She shouldn’t have to get caught up in their mixed resentment.

Bellamy is looking back at the floor, lips clamped so tightly that they’re going white.

Charlotte is flickering between the three of them, curious, like she’s got a million questions on her tongue.

Clarke steps over to her and kneels down in front, raising a hand to her forehead to occupy herself. The skin feels aggressively hot.

“How much did they give you to drink?”

“Um, I don’t know. I drank an awful lot,”

She doesn’t seem very dehydrated when Clarke tries to read into her a little further. In fact, she’s sweating excessively. And she’s pale, stark in comparison to the dark walls of the rover.

“Do you want some more food?”

“No,” her nose shrivels up in disgust. “I’m pretty full.”

It shouldn’t be too much of a problem. She’s just reading into things, Clarke tells herself when she steps back. This is normal. Her immune system is probably just down, and she hasn’t seen a walker up close in so long, she’s probably just imagining the heightened purple color of the veins in Charlotte’s neck.

“Okay. We’ll be in Minnesota by nightfall. You should… probably just get some rest until then,”

She reclaims her seat next to Murphy and doesn’t even try to hide how she slumps her head down on to his shoulder. He’s looking at her strangely and he won’t ever admit to needing her right now, so it honestly kills two birds with one stone.

In fact, it kills a whole flock of them, because now she has somewhere to hold her head, since it’s becoming a lot of effort to do it herself.

Her back leans against the wall and his does too and he goes back to doing whatever he was doing with his gun, as though she isn’t resting on him. Again, they’re in front of people so he won’t show any weakness.

Still, his shoulder relaxes and he’s not thanking her, but he doesn’t have to.

Bellamy keeps talking to Charlotte. It takes a while to figure out what they’re discussing and then Clarke realizes that he’s just telling her a story. It’s a sickeningly Bellamy thing to be doing but he’s distracting Charlotte and himself by doing that.

She closes her eyes and listens to him, imagines it’s her he’s trying to comfort. She feels his eyes on her every now and then but it’s… irrelevant.

 

…

 

Murphy makes Clarke teach him how to twirl an arrow around his fingers for pretty much the rest of the day. When Wells wakes up, they get out of his way, because he seems quite taken with Charlotte and the two of them aren’t as naturally approachable as he is.

They move to the floor, near the doors, and Clarke watches Wells examine the girl from the corner of her eye. She thinks he picks up on _something,_ but she can’t read what that something is.

Obviously, Murphy is God awful at the trick. There’s a lot of swearing and clattering and they have their boots pressed up flat against one another’s as they face each other so Clarke catches each time he tries to stomp his feet.

She knows he needs a distraction and she’s happy to give him one. After all he’s done for her, if he just wants to spend the day taking everything out on an arrow, then she’ll aid that.

Roan and Wells dominate a lot of the group conversations. Whenever someone opens a new discussion up, about flippant, unimportant matters, they are the ones who have to prompt everyone else to join in.

Miller, she learns, is incredibly sarcastic and only speaks if he’s actually got something to say. She sees why him and Bellamy have formed something sort of like a friendship. He doesn’t seem to actually hate Clarke, she’s also come to realize. It’s more that he’s vaguely aware of what’s happening between them all and he’s chosen his side.

She can tell that Bellamy needs someone, so she doesn’t mind being resented in that way for now. It’s a reluctant, weakening hostility anyway. Maybe someday it won’t even be there.

Clarke keeps an eye on Bellamy and Wells, for the rest of the day, because they’re both busy fussing over Charlotte, but it seems she doesn’t actually have too much to worry about. They aren’t acting as though they hate each other, or as though one of them beat the other one to a pulp merely a month ago. There’s tension but they’re ignoring it.

She’s starting to feel the grime again, after four days of being in the same place and not being able to shower. It’s not so bad that they’re having to piss in bottles or anything, but Clarke wouldn’t mind having a little more space, just to stay fresh. She gets why the people who come back always need a day to rest from it all. It’s trying, being around people in such close quarters non-stop for so long.

It was never like that before. She never felt claustrophobic or anything.

Truthfully, she’s just glad that they’re going to be in Minnesota within the next day because at least that gives them something to do.

In the evening, Roan calls in something about how it’ll only be a few hours until they reach the hotel. That’s when things start to get bad.

Murphy is the one to spot Charlotte’s shoulders.

“Clarke,” he mumbles, kicking her leg to get her to wake up. She’d been very almost dosing off, just from the pure exhaustion of staying up for so long.

She snaps her head to the side and ignores the pain that shoots through her shoulders as she cranes to see what he’s gesturing to. Bellamy is asleep, arms crossed over his chest, at Charlotte’s feet. Clarke follows the rest of her body, up to her shoulders which are shaking violently.

But it’s not crying or laughing. It’s kind of convulsive, almost epileptic.

Clarke shoots to her feet and stumbles over Bellamy’s stretched legs on her way over. She doesn’t have time to curse her heightened clumsiness as she topples down to the floor in front of Charlotte or to answer his questioning grunt.

She’s too busy reaching to spin the girl, whose face is hidden, tucked away to the wall.

When Clarke manages to get Charlotte on to her back, she takes in the way her skin has paled further, how her eyes are rolling to the back of her head, leaving only white blank voids in the place where Clarke had seen a pretty hazel.

“Wells!” she calls, hoping it’s enough to wake him.

Bellamy is already at her side, both hands secure on Charlotte’s arms to restrain her.

“Stop,” Clarke hisses at him, annoyed that he’s ignored rule 101 of dealing with a seizure.

The girl is still spasming, completely out of it, with her head thrown so far back that the muscles in her neck are tensed and strained painfully so.

Clarke has seen this stage before. It _might_ be something else. But she’s seen it before.

“What’s going on back there?”

“It’s the kid,” Murphy says, knowing that the three of them are too busy getting her into the recovery position.

“Miller get back there and see what’s-”

“It’s fine,” Bellamy snaps impatiently. “She’ll be fine.”

The episode lasts a good couple of minutes, which extend into hours when something like this is happening. Clarke lets Wells take over, trusts him way more than she trusts herself to look after a fit. Once it’s finished, Charlotte’s eyes open for a second, confused and weary and then she passes out in the next, clearly too tired to wake up from it.

Wells presses the back of his hand to her forehead and looks at Clarke warily.

“She told me she hadn’t been bitten,” Clarke says, slow and quiet but definite. She wouldn’t have been so foolish as to accept a stranger without knowing that.

Wells grimaces.

“She might not have been. This might just be… stress,”

“Stress?” Bellamy asks, gruff.

“I’m grasping at straws,”

It doesn’t need voicing explicitly. The three of them are smart. Everyone in this damn rover is. If this girl is in danger, like real, corporeal danger, then the options really aren’t easy.

They offered her a safe place; they took her in because it was the humane thing to do. But they can’t risk bringing the infection back into base.

Bellamy lifts a hand and they both watch as it moves to stroke through her hair, careful and gentle not to tug at any of the dreaded knots that lie in her bangs. He repeats the motion, over and over, and none of this is fair.

It’s a moment that exists as quiet. Because white noise of the apocalypse is ever-present, and they might not be able to give her anything but this.

Clarke has seen death, knows him more intimately than anyone else here, but only in an abstract, shell sort of way. Her death wasn’t quiet or quick or kind.

Bellamy keeps his fingers light on Charlotte’s sweat-ridden forehead and Clarke doesn’t see a man she could have loved, or the man that did her wrong, or the man that fights, or writes, or watches stars. She just sees someone giving something to a place that isn’t him.

She doesn’t take the moment as a selfish one. She lets it exist as the skeleton that it is: quiet.

 

…

 

It gets even worse from there.

Charlotte wakes up half an hour later without any recollection of where she is or who she’s with. Clarke can’t be sure how far back her memories have been blocked, but it’s not good.

And her pupils have clouded over with something that isn’t describable. There’s no denying the violet of her veins now.

Bellamy moves towards her and sends a look to both Clarke and Wells, asking for them to trust him and to take a step back.

They do, with this. They go back to Murphy, who is sullenly shooting daggers at Clarke’s arrow, balancing it on his middle finger as though he’s going to learn it.

And Clarke hears little snippets of a hushed conversation.

“Charlotte,” he says, soft. “If you’re hurt, or… injured in any way, you can tell me.”

Clarke doesn’t get her answer because she’s speaking much too quietly.

“You don’t have to be afraid. I’m here, and I want to help you, but I can’t if you don’t let me in,”

Some more mumbles follow, and Clarke watches Wells watch the two of them, tucked into the far corner of a bench.

And then, after a few minutes, Wells is jumping to his feet and bounding over to them and Clarke freezes up when she sees Charlotte seizing again, head crashing down to Bellamy’s lap in one swift movement and she’s got one of the legs of her trousers rolled up.

There’s not a distinct bite mark or anything; not like in the movies. Zombies are too sloppy to create something as clean cut as a bite mark. There’s just a chunk of flesh missing from the space where her ankle should be and it’s a wide enough wound to fit to a mouth.

The blood that has dried around it isn’t red. It’s as brown as her eyes were.

“Roan we’ve got a problem,” Wells says as he lifts her head high enough to get Bellamy out from under it. “We need to stop, now.”

His tone doesn’t leave room for argument and Clarke feels the rover swerve violently to the right and the familiar sensation of moving through something solid but permeable is there. Like they’re mowing down hedges and shrubs.

Smart, she thinks. If they drive into a clearing, they’ll have as much visibility as possible.

Miller and Roan are both out of the rover and back into it in one motion and Clarke and Murphy get out as quickly as they can, because that’s what this is. They can’t all stay in the rover anymore.

They make themselves useful in the way that people who have become partially isolated from their emotions can. They scout the area, the light low thanks to the setting sun, but not so low that they can’t see anything.

It’s dusk and the blue of the sky is darker than blue should have to be to still be day.

The four of them get Charlotte out while she’s still fitting, and they lay her down on grass that has died thanks to the heat of summer. Bellamy and Wells don’t leave her side until they’ve gotten her into the recovery position, as comfortable as she can possibly be. And even then, they stay kneeling close to her.

“Jesus Christ,” Roan sighs when he takes in the gaping hole in her leg. His eyes press tight together, like that’s the only way he’ll be able to stop seeing it. “You said she was clean.”

“She told me she was,”

He looks at Clarke like she’s about four years old and it’s the first time he’s looked at her with anything less than respect.

“Did you offer her a way out before you asked if she’d been bitten?”

Clarke thinks.

“I- I don’t know,”

“It doesn’t matter,” Murphy snaps, stepping closer to her.

“It doesn’t matter?” Roan asks, slightly incredulous. “You gave the girl a way out of being alone and you expected her to tell the _truth_ about whether or not she was changing?”

“What did you expect me to do?” Clarke argues, pushing past Murphy’s shoulder. “She’s a kid and she was fucking terrified. I couldn’t just walk away from her,”

“You risked the entire safety of Vancouver over one kid,”

Murphy snorts, which doesn’t help anything.

“Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not like we’re gonna actually take her back there now,”

“Murphy,” Clarke warns. Charlotte is still mid-episode, but they shouldn’t risk her having to hear something like this.

“You’re damn right we’re not gonna take her back there,” Roan pushes on forward and his expression is back to that feline one. Sly, and Clarke understands why it’d be hard to trust.

“We can’t just leave her here,” Wells mumbles to the ground, casting his eyes up to the four of them momentarily.

Roan brings his hands up to his face and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” he asks, not directing it at anyone but it’s not like it’s all of their faults. Clarke was the one foolish enough to believe her. “She’s been using our shit. Eating and drinking from our things, wearing your clothes-”

“Bellamy gave her his flask and it’s not like we’ve been sharing a toothbrush,”

“You think we’re at risk?” Miller questions, sounding skeptical.

“Fuck knows. We could be,”

They quieten when Charlotte stills. Bellamy doesn’t act scared or cautious around her. He’s the one who braces her shoulders and tells her they just had to make a quick pit-stop, that they’ll be moving again pretty soon. He tells her lies that are drops of mercy. And then she’s asleep again.

“There’s only one option,” Bellamy says after they’re done holding their breaths. His voice is blank. “Why are we discussing it like there isn’t?”

“You really have it in you to do something like that?” Wells asks, not spitefully and if this were any other situation, it’d surprise Clarke, but she doesn’t even have the mental capacity to take his tone in.

“She can’t come with us and we can’t leave her on her own,”

Clarke shoves against Roan on her way past him, her feet moving before her mind has caught up, and she kneels down by Charlotte’s head. She lays a finger on the girl’s cheek and moves it in soft circles under her eye, doing whatever she can to bring some sort of semblance of peace.

“I’ll do it,” she says, clear. “I started it. This is my fault,”

Bellamy clears his throat, but she shakes her head.

“This is my fault. Nobody else should have to do it,”

“Clarke,” he says and there’s a confidence to his voice that really, she can’t ignore. “She trusts me. It’ll be kinder…”

She meets his eye and it takes a lot of self-restraint to stop her lip from quivering.

Bellamy looks over to the others and his face goes stony again.

“Get back in the rover. Give her that, yeah? Give her some privacy?”

And there really isn’t anything they can say to argue with that and so they file back in, with Roan heading over to the driver’s seat and Wells walking around to join him.

Bellamy doesn’t look at Clarke like he expects her to do the same and she wouldn’t leave now anyway. She has a responsibility to help Charlotte until the end.

She hears him clear his throat and she knows he’s taking his gun off from around his back.

Clarke keeps running her thumb along Charlotte’s cheek, cupping her jaw lightly, and she doesn’t know when she started humming the song her father used to sing to get her to go to sleep, but she is doing it as Bellamy starts holding his gun in the way that will prepare him to shoot it.

She keeps humming and is glad that Charlotte probably can’t hear it because that means that she might not be aware of being shot. Her last memory will be of Bellamy telling her that things are okay and that she’s got people.

He puts the gun up against Charlotte’s temple and his finger wobbles on the trigger. He was right. It will be kinder if he is the one to do it. Not that she’ll know, but it’s the precedent of it all. The precedent of kindness.

Charlotte doesn’t flinch when the gun rings out. She didn’t feel it. That doesn’t make killing her any easier.

Clarke’s hand is still stroking lullabies against the ghostly sheen of her face and she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to stop.

“We can’t leave her like this,” Bellamy mumbles a few minutes later, his voice still hard and rigid, because he’s right. They aren’t finished.

Clarke doesn’t know if this will in anyway make what they’ve done easier, but she does all she knows to do.

“Come with me,” she says, peeling her hand away and standing to her feet. They feel shaky and like they might collapse out from under her at any moment now.

They walk out to a hedgerow, in silence and in mourning, and Bellamy doesn’t say anything when she leans down and gathers some dainty flowers in one hand. She thinks they might be primroses or something similar.

And they return to Charlotte’s lifeless body and Clarke opens up one of her palms so that she can wrap the stilled fingers around the stems. She brings that hand up to her chest and lets it rest there, and it doesn’t make the corpse look any less ugly, but it adds a sense of peace.

She was so scared.

She doesn’t look scared anymore.

Stepping away, Clarke comes to stand next to Bellamy and they both tear their eyes away from the child to look at one another. Clarke breathes in deeply, taking in the tiredness of his expression, and she wants to take his hand, but she won’t.

Again. It’s not their right to take this moment for themselves.

“Time?” she asks, sober.

“Time,” he agrees, strong, throat bobbing.

The rover doesn’t wait around for long once they’re back inside of it. They’re racing down another meaningless country lane and away from the masked graveyard in seconds.

And Clarke crashes down on to the floor next to Murphy, where she was before, and Bellamy goes to sit on an unoccupied bench, almost opposite Miller. And it just isn’t right.

She fights herself for ten minutes about what she should do but gives up after that.

Clarke stands to her feet and moves towards him, with his head in his hands and his back hunched like he’s eighty.

Murphy catches her wrist in his hand and shoots her a warning look, but she asks him to trust her with the softest of shrugs and it must read on her face that she needs this just as much as Bellamy does, so he lets her go.

She sits down next to Bellamy, only close enough for their knees to be barely brushing. Initially, he doesn’t react at all.

Then he lifts himself up off of his arms and sinks back against the wall, and he doesn’t have to do it in a way that will make their shoulders touch, but he does, and Clarke knows that means something.

They don’t move any closer than that. Neither of them verbally acknowledge the contact of the other, but they don’t need to.

She’s a survivor, sat next to a soldier, both of them too proud to admit to the things that they do need.

The silence is heavy, and Clarke feels Wells do a double take when he tosses his head back and sees the two of them so close together, but that doesn’t matter right now either.

This isn’t a forgiveness or a step forward or anything like that.

 He needs her knee to support his and she needs his shoulder to hold hers up and that’s it.

It’s the nature of their touch. It’s healing and just… necessary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Fall of a thunderbolt waiting,'  
> \- Count Me In, Early Winters
> 
> It's a rainy day; let's say something nice


	32. I'm crashing, I'm crashing right into you

“How far?”

Roan has parked up the rover in another empty gas station, purely because that was the last thing they could get to without being blocked off by traffic. Well, traffic implies the cars scattering the road might start moving sometime soon. So not traffic.

“I’d say about twenty miles, if that,”

The sun has set, maybe a couple hours ago. Roan doesn’t seem perturbed by the thought of walking the streets in the darkness.

They’ve got torches, which is a luxury that the five of them never had before, but it’s a silent agreement not to use them outside at least. They’re just an added risk, a recipe for exposure.

He’s tucked the rover around the side of the building so that it’s fairly hidden. Not that there’s much of a chance of it being stolen, but while that’s a possibility, they should probably take every precaution they have. Clarke has done enough walking to last a lifetime.

“It’s some place called ‘motel six’. I don’t know, just look for any street signs pointing to somewhere to spend the night,”

“They can be pretty big buildings,” Miller says, buckling his rucksack at the hips. “They give you any specifics about where they might be?”

“Nope,” Roan answers him, not sounding too bothered about that. They’ll just have to find them the hard way; through trial and error and a lot of shooting.

Clarke opens the door to the rover and jumps down from it, adjusting the straps of her bag so that they sit a little tighter.

“Here,” Bellamy mutters quietly from behind her, still stood on the platform that the floor of the rover gives, and she turns around to see what he wants.

He leans forward, just a little, and reaches over her shoulder to tug at a flap of material that brings the whole pack up.

“Thanks,”

Clarke tries to find the one on the other side, but she comes up empty. Bellamy barely waits through ten seconds of her floundering before his hand comes to rest on her upper arm, rotating her softly so that he can get to it.

She lets him. It’s something that members of a team would do for each other. Not everything between them has to feel intimate, and maybe one day, it won’t.

She steps away once it sits okay and clears her throat, loading her bow for something to do.

Roan has a map in his hand when she goes around the circumference to meet him, his finger trailing along a windy path of it. He’s trying to find which way to orientate it, Clarke realizes pretty quickly.

“You’re facing west,” she tells him, short but not cold.

His face gives nothing away, but he readjusts and tilts the map at an angle.

Murphy and Wells are muttering lowly to each other as they step out the back of the rover and Bellamy and Miller are the last to follow, closing the doors behind them in one swift motion.

“Griffin,” Roan says, the voice of a leader again, as the other four start to head over to them. “You’re suspended when we get back.”

He says it so simply, so basic like a command, that it takes a moment for what he’s actually telling her to sink in.

He’s not even looking at her when he says it, he’s looking at the map still.

“You’re kidding,”

Clarke’s head snaps to him.

He doesn’t look like he is.

Murphy approaches her on her left, gun strap on the same shoulder of his dominant hand.

“You clearly need more time,” Roan shrugs, reaching to fold the map and place it in the belt at his waist. “To adjust.”

To adjust?

“You’re gonna try and trap me because I made one mistake?” she bites, bowstring falling slack in her grip as she unloads the arrow from it.

“You made a choice that wasn’t yours to make. You can pay for the consequences of that,”

He argues with a level head. He’s not being flippant or wasteful with the words and she can’t imagine him actually losing his cool.

“Hey,” Miller says, stepping forward and Clarke barely notices Bellamy behind him, or next to him, depending on what angle you look at the two of them from. “Let’s not make any rash decisions.”

“Why not?” Roan smiles, lips pressed tight and bitter. It ages him. “This shit started with a rash decision.”

“You’re really going to punish me for trying to help someone?”

“Don’t twist things,”

“No, Roan. You don’t get to pick and choose who we try to save and then put me in a cage when I try to-”

“Griffin, remember your place,”

“My place?”

“You’re my soldier, Clarke. You follow what I say and that’s it,”

“So all of that fucking family bullshit was just that, right?”

“Roan, you can’t just punish Clarke for this,” Bellamy says, tired. “We both trusted Charlotte. If you’re gonna bench her then you should probably bench me too.”

Roan ignores Bellamy and keeps his eyes, ice and stone, solidly on Clarke. He’s got both hands on his hips as he looks down on her, but Clarke steps forward.

“It’s not bullshit,” he says, fucking _smiling_.

He has the nerve to smirk at a time like this.

“Really? What do you see then? Because all I see is a group of fucking nomads, half of whom couldn’t give a shit about your _family_ , who are doing this because it is their job and nothing more, and the other half are too busy resenting each other to so much as pretend to be functioning,”

Murphy snorts from behind her back and she hears him mumble an amused “whom?”.

Roan considers, the corner of his mouth turning up as he thinks and takes her in. His head cocks to the side, almost amused.

“You need to get your priorities in order, Angel. This team, whether you like it or not, is the thing that you need to look after. Not random kids that you pick up off the street,”

“Roan, it was just as much my call as it was Clarke’s,”

“Why? You’re saying we’re suddenly more valuable just because we know how to look after ourselves and they don’t?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,”

“You don’t get to decide that,”

“Yes,” he says, sounding uninterested. “I do.”

Clarke doesn’t want to be having this conversation anymore. She doesn’t even want to look at him. If this is what a person has to become in order to be a leader, then Clarke doesn’t want any part in it.

She turns away from him, her stomach telling her how disgusted she is by the churning sound it makes, and she marches forward towards the road they’re going to have to take.

The rest of them stay silent and she can’t hear anyone making a move to follow, so Clarke gives up after a couple of steps and tosses her head back.

All of them are watching her, expressions ranging from amused to calculating to uninterested.

“Are we waiting for something else?” she asks, eyes narrowing. “Because if I’m about to be chained down when we get back, then I’d like to make this mission worth something.”

Wells makes a choked sound and carries it out into the side of his fist, playing it off.

And Roan keeps that same fucking smirk on his face when he brings a pistol out from a pocket and walks forward, pointing the handle of it to the right.

“Let’s aim to get there before sunrise,” he says to no one in particular. “Survivors will slow us down on the way back.”

Miller and Wells move to follow and Wells touches Clarke’s arm on the way past her, comfortingly and almost apologetic. She waits for Murphy to catch up, knowing that if it’s emotion that she wants to avoid then he’s the person to be around.

“Okay,” Murphy says, offering her some nuts from a handful he’s taken from his pocket. They taste more like his sweaty hand than cashews, but Clarke eats them anyway. She’s vaguely aware of Bellamy bringing up the rear behind them. “Either he wants to kill you, fuck you, or be you.”

“Probably all three,” she snorts.

They’re walking in the direction opposite to the one the cars are facing in, but this road isn’t completely cluttered. There’s space enough to make it comfortable to move between them. Clarke doubts they’re near a town center, or anything too busy, but they’re not in the countryside anymore.

“Why’s he only got a pistol?” Clarke asks, kicking a stone.

“He’s more of a hand-to-hand combat kind of guy,”

“And that actually works with walkers?”

“On my first trip out I saw him take the head off of one like it was nothing,”

“You what?”

“Well, not actually take it off. But it took him like two seconds to snap its neck,”

“Jesus Christ,”

His shoulder bumps casually against hers and initially, Clarke doesn’t really notice it. But then his bag knocks hers and she realizes he’s leaning in closer on purpose.

“Listen,” he whispers, head ducking so that Clarke doesn’t have to crane to hear. “I don’t know what all that was back there-”

“I’m not just going to let him dictate who is and isn’t worth the risk-”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” his eyes roll blatantly, eyelids hooded. “I just- I think you should be careful.”

When Clarke can only look at him quizzically, wondering how sleep-deprived he might be, he huffs and nods his head back harshly.

“With him,”

“I know what I’m doing, Murphy,”

“Do you?” he asks, unconvinced, snarky, but uncharacteristically timid.

Clarke thinks it over, how she’d only acted upon instinct when she went and leaned on Bellamy’s side. The moments of hesitation must give him an answer he already knows to be true.

“I’m just saying, he’s made it pretty clear what he wants…”

“And that isn’t me. Got it,”

Murphy doesn’t say anything for a while as he works his way up to approach the thing he’s trying to ask.

“Spit it out,” Clarke smiles, without venom.

“Do you trust him?”

She turns her head around, tossing it over her shoulder to take Bellamy in. He’s watching his boots as he walks and she can barely see his furrowed brow, all the creases on his forehead as he thinks. Part of her wonders if he is close enough to hear their conversation. Part of her wonders if she cares about that.

“I don’t know,” she answers, eyes flicking back to Murphy, defeated. “It’s hard to figure out what trust is now.”

“You said that about hurt,” Bellamy says from behind them and they both snap back to see, purely out of shock. He’s lifted his gaze, focused only on Clarke, as though Murphy isn’t anywhere close by. He looks more confused than anything else, the space between his eyebrows still all crinkled. Lips drawn and twisted. He says those words blankly, working something out. He doesn’t sound like their relationship was the topic of the conversation he’s blatantly been eavesdropping.

She feels Murphy looking hurriedly between the two of them, trying to catch on to whatever he must be missing. She hadn’t told anyone about the run in with Cage. She hasn’t said anything about any of the times she’s been alone with Bellamy.

Maybe Bellamy doesn’t know that.

Or maybe he knows that better than he knows anything; that she’d treat him as nothing in her life now.

“I meant it about hurt,” is what Clarke chooses to answer with. She’s allowed to be confused about a lot.

Roan’s gun fires off in the distance of their spread out line.

Wells and Miller are talking flippantly. They were both in Vancouver before any of them gate crashed, Clarke reminds herself.

“You didn’t know what hurt is?” Murphy questions slowly, drawn out.

“Don’t,” she corrects, shrugging.

He turns around to walk backwards, casual and easy, and she sees a smirk take form on his face. The one he saves for people he doesn’t trust, and really, that’s everyone, apart from a couple of people. Red lights start flashing in the back of her mind.

“Well what do you think?” he asks, and Clarke holds her head up high to the people in front of her so that she doesn’t have to see Bellamy. He flicks his head in the way that makes it clear who he’s asking.

“What?” Bellamy snaps. He’s got levels of talking to people. He talks to Clarke differently when they’re alone, just like Murphy does. Still, the tone he uses on the latter is even colder than the one he saves for her. It makes her realize that this is the first time he’s spoken to her in front of anyone.

“You think you hurt her?”

They don’t sound like they’re having a conversation about this at all. It’s too sparse.

“Murphy,”

“No, Clarke. If you aren’t gonna get anything else, you should get this, right?” he says and Clarke has to reach out for his arm when he stumbles over a rock or something behind him, to stop him from falling on his ass.

Maybe he’s right. If she won’t get any other answers…

Bellamy stays silent and she doesn’t have to see him to know the heat that is radiating from him. She can picture the crimson across his neck, the heaviness of his steps, the weight of his breath.

“Do you think you hurt her?” Murphy asks, condescending as he spells the words out, sounding amused. “Do you think what you did made her hurt?” he adds on, just to rub salt in the wound.

He trips over something else once he’s folded his arms across his chest and Clarke sighs.

“Would you look where you’re going?” she snaps, fists tightening in the edge of his sleeve.

“You don’t know-” Clarke hears Bellamy growl under his breath before he breathes in deeply and quietens. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Yeah,” Murphy sighs, finally spinning back around so that he can actually see the path he’s taking. “I didn’t think so.”

He doesn’t look like he has anything more to add to Bellamy, still seething and resentful, but satisfied with that in a hopeless way.

“Come on Clarke,”

He nods his head forward, gesturing for them to put some more space between them and Bellamy, perhaps to go and see if Wells is alright, but she shakes her head.

“You go ahead. We need people at the back too,”

He takes a few longer strides, letting her know that he’s not sticking around. Then Murphy tosses a warning look over his shoulder, one that says, ‘don’t fall for anything,’ and she guesses that maybe he really just can’t stand to be around Bellamy. Maybe his hatred is that bitter and that violent. That the mere proximity of the other man is enough to get under his skin.

The thing about Murphy though, is he doesn’t try to smother her, or protect her from whatever he thinks she needs protecting from. He’s always known that she wants to be able to look after herself. And so sticking to her side isn’t always necessary.

He might be leaving because he knows Bellamy would never open up with him around. But there’s not much hope in him doing that when he’s not around either.

She doesn’t fall into step with Bellamy for at least the first fifteen minutes. She does what she says she’d do and keeps a look out on either side for any shifty figures in the dark. There’s not a lot of visibility so Clarke relies pretty heavily on the things she can hear, but the more she focuses on that, the more his weighted steps flow through her.

The more his breathing drifts into something comforting and repetitive and easy. And she falls back slowly, closing the space between them in a way that she doesn’t even notice until she can see his feet every time she looks at her own.

He doesn’t try to get away and he doesn’t try to talk to her either. Not until an hour has passed in silence.

Clarke doesn’t know why he waits that long. Maybe that’s how long it takes for him to accept that they’re not in immediate danger.

“You- uh- you shouldn’t have to take the fall for a mistake we both made,” he mumbles, and Clarke is so stilted by it that she freezes in place for a second.

“Yeah, well,” she sighs, recovering. “Roan seems to have decided that I should.”

“You know I don’t resent you, right?”

“What?”

“Back there, you said half of us are too busy resenting each other to pretend,”

She shrugs, not sure what else to do. She remembers telling him that she hates him and refuses to blush at the immaturity of that.

“Yeah, I didn’t mean to drag you into it. I just wanted to make my point,”

“Point made,”

“Don’t try and start a conversation, Bellamy. We always sucked at small talk,” Clarke says, kicking something unrecognizable along the road.

He huffs a little and runs a hand through his hair.

“I’m not trying to do anything. I just want you to know-”

“I know. Don’t you worry. I know.”

She doesn’t even try to hide the bitterness.

 

…

 

Hours pass and the realization that they’re stepping into a danger zone seeps in as the sky only seems to get darker. Walkers are around constantly. With each gunshot, they amplify, and Clarke doesn’t have time to think about everything that has happened because she’s drawn back into the thing she’d been trying so long to escape from.

It’s never felt like a video game. Not in the science fiction way, or the horror movie way.

There’s too much quiet for that. Too much waiting.

She’d thought the cold might have an effect on them, but either they’ve recovered, or they weren’t injured at all. The point is, the numbers are only getting larger.

None of them get close enough to become anything more than a silhouette but the sounds coming from each one are enough to know.

The hotel is on the edge of an empty road, a few blocks down from the highway. They might have been able to find a route around with the rover, but they’re here now and the vacancy of the road space wasn’t a sure thing.

It’s a good thing the sun isn’t up yet because the place is, in a word, crawling. They had been steadily building up to a horde and Clarke knows that. They’d caught the signs along the way, of divergents that had escaped the pack to wonder aimlessly. It’s pretty hard to even see the ground floor of the hotel from where they are, at the edge of the car park, tucked behind a silver SUV.

Clarke has her bow loaded, even as she’s hunched down to scout the surroundings out. A walker could break through the clearing and spot them at any point, and if they don’t silence it before that then the whole horde will be on top of them.

She’s been pushed to the front as the only one with a silenced weapon. It’s her responsibility, and she wonders how they managed when they mostly only had guns. Sure, from what people have said, a lot of them are skilled at hand-to-hand, but it’s not the same thing as a long range weapon.

“Okay so simple end around, right?” Murphy claps his hands once, rubbing his palms together with a grimace of mock concentration. “Nothing too out there, Roan if you’re still happy being the quarterback then Clarke can-”

“Shut it,” Roan grumbles, bending down to pick up a large stick so that he can start doodling in the mud.

When he doesn’t stand back to his full height, just braces himself on his knees, Murphy makes a comment about how it’s time for a huddle and the rest of them make their way over, a few of them not quite sinking down to meet his level so that they’re still guarded.

Roan’s drawing is uninspired. His square of the hotel is sectioned into five wonky lines that make it look a little like a candy bar.

“You know the drill for search and rescue. We split off, find the same number of people we’ve been told to find, and we get out of there. No stopping to blow up a few hundred walkers; that’s not why we’re here. They’ll be weak and afraid, and they’re armed so I want you to be careful. You check for weird behavior, do not assume they’re safe just because they were a few days ago.”

Clarke doesn’t say anything, she just watches the writhing bubble circling their destination and feels her eyebrows scrunch up as she cranes to look for a way in.

“We need to draw them away from the entrance,” she says, more to herself, thinking out loud.

“What’s that?”

“We won’t get in if they’re all still there when we’re trying. We need a distraction,”

“That’s… not how we do things, Griffin,” Roan sighs.

“Then how do you suppose we get in?”

“We move around; the fire escapes are usually pretty promising. Oddly enough, walkers never quite manage to find the doors to these places,”

“No, she’s right,” Bellamy says, looking over to the entrance, the same spot Clarke is looking at. “They’re not struggling to find a way in, look.”

And they aren’t. They can see, from here, the main entrance thrown open. With no net movement of zombies; the same amount coming in as leaving, clearly the threat isn’t going to die down once they’re inside.

“And what sort of distraction do you suppose we use?”

She spins around, after making sure Wells is covering the side that she had been and leans over Roan’s shoddy diagram.

“Okay, there’s going to be another exit and if they’re trying so hard to get in through the front, then they won’t have broken through the other. You said we’re supposed to split up right? So two of us go around the back, find the fire escape, and wait for a signal. Two of us can stay here and wait until the coast is clearer to come in, until we’ve got a real route inside-”

“And the other two need to expose themselves,” Bellamy carries on, fully focused on the ground. This isn’t emotion, or romantic betrayal right now. This is their responsibility. “Fire guns, get out in the open, and run like hell,”

“It’s a risk,” Roan decides, not sounding happy about it, but not sounding completely opposed. He might be impressed but Clarke wouldn’t give him that much. He thinks for a couple moments. “I don’t like it.”

Miller snaps his head around from the sight of his gun, looking to Bellamy.

“The two that stay here need to keep down, otherwise they’ll have to make a run for it too and we aren’t having the majority of us leaving this place,”

“I’m not just gonna be a sitting duck,” Murphy sounds like he’s rolling his eyes.

“Shut it,” Wells snaps, without too much edge but still a warning.

“Griffin I want you round the back,” with Roan’s addition to the plan, it takes her a second longer to realize what he’s telling her than it does the others, purely as she needs the time to adjust to his acceptance. He’s not overruling her or trying to stake his claim on the leadership. He’s not as obtuse as maybe she’d thought. “I’m not having any of you risk your lives by doing anything as reckless as becoming a distraction-”

“Well you aren’t doing it on your own,” Bellamy says, leaving very little room for argument. Roan considers him for time longer than they actually have.

“Miller, you’re not great at long range. It doesn’t make sense for you to stay here. Go with her,”

“Wait-” Bellamy tries to start but he gets cut off.

“Blake you’re the fastest of the lot of us,”

“So that does make us sitting ducks,” Murphy sighs, snarky again as he nudges Wells. “I think this is the survival equivalent of being benched.”

“They’ll need a medic but not straight away. If they’re injured so bad that it’s urgent then they aren’t going to make it at all,”

“That’s bullshit,” Clarke scoffs.

“We aren’t carrying dead weight,”

“We’ll make that call when we get to it,” Miller breezes on forward, knowing that otherwise, it’s just going to erupt into another argument.

“Murphy, Wells, I want you in there as soon as you see a clear path. No waiting around for us to get back, no waiting for a signal from Griffin,”

Clarke can hear Bellamy chewing on his jaw from the opposite side of the half huddle.

This is the trip for fuel for their truck all over again. She’s silenced. She is the front line soldier because of it, and he needs to accept that.

She doesn’t want him putting himself on the front line. He’s certainly going to be more at risk if the walkers have him clear in their sights.

They haven’t been in this situation in so long. The last life or death ambush that she can properly remember is the fuel trip, when she missed. Obviously that wasn’t their last run in with a walker, but it was the last time she had to deal with more than one at a time.

And to be separated from her fighting partner- which is what he became, whether they ever admitted that or not- doesn’t feel right.

“Miller’s just as fast as me,” Bellamy says quietly, forehead all wrinkled. “And Clarke should be used long range.”

No she shouldn’t. Not with this. To get in without being noticed, they have a better chance if they can kill any walkers that do notice them without every other one finding out.

Murphy tuts his teeth flippantly, like he doesn’t care if he’s the only one who hears it.

“Soldiers, Blake,” she tells him, looking for the fastest way to get her point across without associating too much sentimentality. It’s what they said to each other, in the privacy of their own whispers, but no one else needs to know that. She can pretend that this is just another reminder: as simple and as casual as reminding someone to tie their laces.

She tries not to think about him running out and dangling himself in front of a horde of zombies. It doesn’t work.

“No, Roan is right. I’m shit at long range shooting,” Miller decides, quite frank about admitting to weakness. “I may as well get up close and personal with it all.”

Bellamy doesn’t let his expression falter as he moves to study their surroundings again, and Roan is quiet about it all; like there isn’t a group of girls inside that place probably scared for their lives.

“Then _I’ll_ go with you,” Bellamy says.

No matter how sensible he tries to make it sound, no matter how many times he tries to clear her from the firing line, it isn’t the smart decision. He’s never let logic rule him, and Clarke doesn’t know what’s doing it now. It could be guilt. Maybe he’ll feel better if he thinks he’s played some part in keeping her alive for longer.

Whatever it is, there’s no room for it.

“Do you remember what you told me about Ariadne?” she asks him, hoping, leading with the anger that she’s harnessed all through her body, willing that cloud between her own fingertips. She’ll make it clear that she doesn’t want his pity, or his charity, or his shame.

Roan’s ears prick up. Murphy and Miller seem unaffected. Wells is unreadable.

Bellamy doesn’t quite meet her eye, but he doesn’t back down from her challenge either. He’s watching the arrow in her bow when he speaks.

“You hated Dionysus,” he answers, sounding slightly skeptical but more curious. He won’t try to deny the conversations they had; that’s not who he is. “We argued about it.”

Clarke doesn’t think about how much she treasured that night. How much she still does. It’s tainted by what he said now.

“Do you remember what you said?”

She sounds a lot like an elementary school teacher which isn’t the intention.

He’s still thinking, processing, flipping back through the relics of their moments, wondering what on Earth that debate might have to do with this.

“What did he say?” Murphy asks, too amused for his own good, like he’s cheering her on. Like he’s been waiting for Clarke to throw everything back in Bellamy’s face all along.

And she plays along. She will, if it gets her message through to him.

“He said you don’t just run away,” she says, not breaking from her scrutiny on his shoulders. “You don’t just take the coward’s way out. Not with this,”

“Clarke-” Roan tries to cut in, sounding impatient, because now isn’t the time for this. She doesn’t bother to register he’s gone back to using her given name.

“You see, we were children back then,” she adds, to no one in particular, because the person this is for won’t meet her eye. “We believed in things like myths… and love.”

Clarke hates to say that word, hates everything that she thought it meant at the time. It means so much more and so much less all at once now.

Murphy snorts, ugly, but he’s not enjoying any of this. It’s more of an approval of her spite.

“You were right about one thing, though Blake,” she’s aiming for the home run, the touch down that will make it clear to him how little he gets a say in the matter of her life. He perks up a little, the lump in his throat stilling as he hears her out. “You were right about the flame. You know how she burnt.”

Clarke wants him to see that in her. The fire he lit when he broke her heart. She thought she was cold and maybe in some ways, she is. But if there’s one thing she’s not going to let him take, it’s that torrential flame that he left behind.

She’s going to do what she needs to do, and he’s not going to get to put a shield up in front of her.

She needs him to stay alive, for the sake of her own selfish heart. But he doesn’t get to need the same thing. That’s another thing he threw away.

“Clarke cut it out,” Wells mumbles, facing out to the horde which is still climbing and clinging to the crumbling walls.

“What? Thought it might be good to know,” she shrugs back, stepping away from the huddle. “I’m only making conversation, you know, just making up for the time I lost while I was _dead_.”

And she gets a wince out of him from that. The same characteristic narrowing of his eyes as he takes the blow.

“The teams are decided,” Roan snaps, giving them no more time to relish in the newfound heat. “I’m not going to waste time bickering about who you think should be where. Miller, Griffin, get lost. Work your way from the top floor and down and don’t hang around if you can’t find them. If you’re stood still long enough to catch your breath then you’ve been stood still for too long.”

“Got it,” Clarke nods. “Try not to breathe.”

She wants to make a comment about how she’s used to that, but she won’t become that petty. Bellamy isn’t fighting for her to sit on the side lines anymore; there wouldn’t be a point in stooping low again.

She brushes past Murphy and Wells, her shoulder knocking into the barrels of their guns. There isn’t time for heartfelt goodbyes.

She nods at Murphy, wraps an arm around Wells’ neck and squeezes. Momentary and quick enough that Roan won’t catch it; if he did, he’d probably take another dig at her. He presses a kiss to the top of her cheek, grazing the bone.

She pulls away and kicks Murphy in the shins, a warning to keep both him and Wells safe. She feels Bellamy’s eyes on her but ignores it.

Murphy raises an eyebrow, a question to make sure she remembers everything he’s said. They’ve had so many awkwardly overly sentimental moments, she can’t pinpoint the one he wants her to have right now.

She looks over their shoulders to find Miller, but he’s talking pretty intensely with Bellamy, and it doesn’t look happy. Roan is sorting something out with his pack, but she bounds over, wanting to just get this out of the way.

“You ready?” she asks, walking up to them both shamelessly.

Neither of them seem to notice her, or react at least, and Bellamy is looking kind of pleadingly at his friend.

Miller turns on his heels, scratches at his shaved head and lifts his gun so that it’s aiming up to the sky.

“Lead the way, partner,” he shrugs but starts inching forward before she can follow up on what he says.

“Roan, go west along the highway. If we don’t meet up before the rover, then we’ll see you there,”

“We’ll find you before then,” he waves a hand dismissively. “Stay safe.”

And Clarke takes that as her queue to leave. She shifts awkwardly for a moment, adjusting to the plan she’s committed to, and then she moves to follow Miller’s path; purposefully rounded to stay inside of the shadows.

He’s waited up for her, a few feet ahead, ducked a little behind a short car that would only reach his navel if he were standing upright.

“Clarke,”

Bellamy calls her name once she’s at least far away enough that it’d be foolish to have a conversation between the gap she’s created. And she doesn’t even register it as him at first, she just stills and doesn’t try to get any closer to Miller.

His footsteps are getting nearer. She didn’t think they were going to say goodbye.

“Clarke,” he says again, and his palm comes to rest on her elbow as he walks around to face her, blocking Miller from her view.

“What?”

She doesn’t try to shrug him off. She can hate him all she wants. That doesn’t mean his touch is worth shaking away.

“I just…” he looks down to his feet, his voice impossibly quiet and gruff with the effort he’s putting into speaking.

“I’m on a clock,”

“I know,”

He doesn’t make any sort of indication that he’s in a hurry.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he starts eventually, still gruff, and Clarke can feel everyone watching them. She wonders how likely they think it is that she’ll hit him.

“I know that,”

“You don’t owe me anything at all. But uh, could you be careful?”

She’s so fucking angry at him.

This is the most emotion he’s given her in months, and it means nothing.

It’s the first time that Clarke has actually felt like crying is a possibility.

“I’m alive,” she says simply, feels herself smile as sadly as a smile can be. Taking a shaky breath, she watches as he watches her. “And I don’t want to waste that again.”

He meets her eye. It’s a treasurable feeling, when he does that. They hold something unrecognizable. Clarke knows what it’s more likely to be, but she hopes it might be admiration, or along those lines.

He nods once, and when he takes his hand away from her arm, she realizes how much she’d been leaning into it. She has to straighten herself in the seconds it takes to recover, and she doesn’t let herself regret not asking the same thing of him.

He can’t know that she still needs him, after everything. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone involved.

Clarke doesn’t look back at all. She doesn’t need to because he’s watching after her, his gaze like hands on her back.

Her and Miller ascend into darkness together, and they round the corner on the way away from the parking lot. 

The horde doesn’t ease up on the other side of the building. The masses are still just rolling and moaning over one another, reaching for anything the crusted brick wall might have to offer. The two of them drop down underneath a shrub lining the boundary to the hotel, scooting backwards until they’re pressed against the ground and hidden.

Clarke struggles to aim with her bow from the flat position, but it’s not worth fretting about being uncomfortable. She’s too busy, too high on alert for the upcoming sounds of gunfire.

A single thought plays through her head as she blanks out Miller’s unimpressed grunts: Bellamy needs to run. Just run. He’s putting himself out there, front and center, and it’s something they never would have risked before. She never would have let him do it. And if this ends up being too big a risk, then she’s only got herself to blame.

No, he needs to stay alive.

“Stop worrying,” Miller blanks after about five minutes of the walker growls and no change.

“I’m not wor-”

“I can hear you grinding your teeth from here,”

Her jaw stills, freezes.

“He knows what he’s doing,”

Bellamy used to be a fighter. Clarke remembers the days where she could see him fight. They feel abstract now.

She says nothing.

“I should have gone with Roan,” he says under his breath. “Should have known that separating the two of you was a bad idea.”

“You aren’t separating us,” Clarke silences him, rolling her eyes. She doesn’t need to hear him talking like that.

She risks poking her head out a little further from the shelter so that she can get a better balance. Miller stays where he is.

“He knows what he’s doing,” he repeats himself, as though she didn’t hear him the first time.

“Maybe you two are the ones who shouldn’t have been separated,”

“I’m not the one chewing my lips to shreds,”

“It’s a habit,”

“He’s probably worse, you know,”

“No offence,” she says, elbows digging a crater in the soft ground. “But you really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He knows nothing about how Bellamy feels for Clarke. If he did, he wouldn’t be sat trying to convince her that he’s in as bad a state as she is.

“I think you’ll find, I’m the only one who actually knows what I’m talking about. The rest of you all speak in riddles,”

“Or we don’t speak at all,”

“See what I mean?”

Clarke rolls her eyes and lets him sound smug, sure of himself, hoping that this will leave him content with the silence.

It works for a while; they sit there and watch as the walkers refuse to relent, almost as though they can smell the humans inside. That’s another thing that the movies got wrong; walkers don’t run as well as they wander. They’ll do it if they need to, if they know they’re about to hunt, but they aren’t as good at it. They were born to be lonely; mutated to be lonely.

“What’s taking them so long?” she growls at the edge of her bowstring.

“Maybe they’re waiting for it to get lighter?”

“Why would they do that?”

“Hey, I’m not the thinker here,”

“Clearly,”

She feels him smirk behind her.

“She’s not good, you know,” Miller says, as though he’s asking her to shuffle along a little more. “For him, I mean.”

“Who?”

“Echo,” he shrugs; ‘who else could I be talking about?’ It seems to say. “Even if he were tempted to go in that direction, the only reason he would is because of that. He’s not. Tempted, that is,”

“What are you trying to do?” she gives in, elbows sinking even further.

“You deserve to know more than you do,”

“Apparently you’re the only one who thinks that,”

“No, m’not the only one. Just the only one with the balls to say it out loud,”

There’s a pause as she considers him, thinks about how many times he’s looked at her like he wants her gone.

“You don’t even like me,” she sulks, and it sounds just like that. Like she’s sulking.

“I don’t know you,” he excuses, not denying, but not agreeing. “Just what you did to him.”

“What I did?”

“You really don’t get it, do you?”

She has to laugh at that. If she doesn’t laugh then she might punch him, and that’s not exactly what Roan expects from teamwork.

“That’s funny, really it is. Almost sounds like you think it was _me_ who chose to hurt _him_ ,”

“That’s…” he tries, clearly thinking on the spot. He grumbles a bit as he tries to get more comfortable and gun shots fire in the distance. There’s no reaction initially, there’s a delay as the walkers back here fail to receive the sounds. “That’s not why he walked away.”

“Oh yeah? And you think you know?”

She turns her head back momentarily and takes in his expression; blank, unbothered. Him and Bellamy are perhaps too similar. Miller would probably be her type of person, her type of friend, if things weren’t so messed up.

His lips are folded over themselves, turning white under the vice of his teeth, stopping whatever he was going to say next from coming out.

His eyes are downcast; apparently not quite as brave as he thinks he is.

“Yeah,” Clarke hums, eyebrow raised, goose bumps rising on her neck as a wave of ice washes over her. “I didn’t think so.”

More gun shots, closer this time. She’s going to fucking kill him.

Miller sighs and it’s a distraction from the perked interest of the walkers, obviously torn between investigating their current prey and tracking the new sound, a rarity to them, or to the survivors of them, at least.

“Okay Griffin, you want to know how I know that it killed him to leave you?”

“Enlighten me,” she bites, smiling ruefully. It’s an amusement, if nothing else.

“He was a mess,”

Clarke is about to laugh again, at the triviality of that, but Miller carries on before she has the chance to.

“Like something inside of his head had been cut short, a loose wire or something. He didn’t know how to function, like at all. And those days, and the nights where he couldn’t so much as hold himself together… it was just so fucking obvious how much he needed you.”

 _I needed him too_ , she wants to say, and again, he doesn’t let her.

“And not even in that way. It wasn’t… I don’t know, it wasn’t physical,”

“You shouldn’t be telling me this,” Clarke cuts in before she misses her shot again. For so many reasons, he shouldn’t be saying any of this. The walkers are clearing out and they’re going to have to move any second now, if they want as much time to find the girls as possible. And it feels dirty, hearing about Bellamy in the time where he didn’t want her.

She gets ignored.

“I didn’t… understand what was actually going on until I saw that. It was like, well you were comatose in a hospital bed, unresponsive, closer to being dead than being alive, but even being around you… everyone saw how much that would have helped him,”

 _I’m not a stress ball_ , Clarke wants to say next.

“Aren’t you breaking some kind of bro code by doing this?”

“Nah, there’s a lot I’m not saying. It’s not my job to tell you that he’s a good man or anything, because deep down, you already know that, and I think you’ll find out that he’s still a good man when he lets you know. It’s just my job to tell you how pathetic he is,”

“Charming,”

He doesn’t say anything until he nudges Clarke’s shoulder to get her to stand, pointing his way to a fire escape and taking off before he can give her a chance to catch up.

She does, on her own.

“I’m sorry for dumping it all on you now,” he says, maybe a little remorsefully as they near the building. “I wouldn’t get another chance. Your friends hover around you like you’re about to fucking melt and they all act like this is easy for him. Like it’s something he wanted to do.”

She doesn’t really have anything to answer that with. It’s a bit overwhelming, and she won’t have time to process it until later.

No, her mind is too busy comprehending the walker barreling clumsily around the corner, clearly not catching on to the crowd heading the other way, and she fires her arrow to its face, not watching where it lodges itself before she’s leading the way inside a darkened hallway.

Just as she expected, the corridors are carrying stragglers, sniffing out the scent of flesh as though they can actually smell something, regardless of if they can or not.

They shoot their way through: there really is no other way. As soon as Miller starts firing, they become a target. But there’s two of them, and they can pick off any incomers before there’s an actual threat of contact.

They race up the stairs, her heart beating out of her chest in a way that it hasn’t in so long. She’s never been much of an adrenaline junkie, but this feeling. She hasn’t felt so alive in months. It’s just simplicity, this fighting. Nothing else exists but staying alive.

Once they’ve reached the top of the staircase, maybe three or four floors high, bombs start going off on the ground floor, and she knows that Murphy and Wells have made it through.

Bellamy’s face flashes through her mind. Nothing else exists but him staying alive too.

Miller doesn’t waste any time in kicking the doors down, refusing to be quiet or muted. There are some infected up here too, stumbling towards the sounds of their heavy breaths and unashamed footsteps, but it’s a process that Clarke has done hundreds of times. The number of eyes she shoots through is obscene, but Miller is the hunk of muscle on their team.

He knocks the doors down like dominoes, in a way that she doubts Murphy or even Roan could have done. And she doesn’t have time to be angry about how he made himself out to be incompetent.

They don’t find anything on the top floor.

The move down. When Clarke throws open the door to the next line of rooms, a walker flies toward her, hands splayed out to reach for her face. It’s a shock, and she jumps out of her skin, but she doesn’t let it get any further than that before it’s properly dead.

Door 329 is harder to get down than any of the others. Miller tells her that in sparse words as she takes down the walkers coming from either side of them, and he wraps on the wood with his hand. Knocking isn’t something a walker would do. There’s no response and so he shoves his shoulder up against it, giving up with launching his foot into it.

“Hey!” he shouts through the wall, incessantly knocking, because they don’t have time to wait around. “We got a distress call!”

Clarke has been managing to scavenge most of the arrows that she’s fired so far, on her way past, and she keeps up the routine. She hasn’t been able to catch her breath yet, so she isn’t as bad at following orders as Roan might have thought.

“We’re here to get you out!” she calls, helping him shove down the door.

It’s been blocked by something, a wardrobe perhaps, but something knocks heavily against the plaster on the other side of her head, panicked, desperate. There are definitely people inside the room.

There’s some shuffling, the sound of furniture shrieking as it slides against the floor, and there’s still someone heckling the inside of the wall to make sure they don’t leave.

Miller gives the door another rough but shallow hit, enough to break the latch, but not enough that it will fly wide open in case there’s someone just on the other side.

And then there’s a blonde girl, hair matted like it was in a braid once upon a time, bags under her eyes that make her whole face seem gray, frame so thin that she could have snapped if Miller had bumped her at all with that door.

Her face breaks out, not into a smile, but into a whimper. Relieved and almost ready to collapse with the knowledge that she’s going to get out of here.

Clarke can’t remember a better feeling than this; seeing the relief of being saved on someone else’s face.

“Maya,” the girl moans, looking briefly to her right, beckoning with a lazy arm.

Miller doesn’t waste any time, and Clarke steps away to keep protecting them. She turns her back and stops the rabid brunette hurling itself their way.

“There were three of you,” Miller says, finite, procedure.

“Two now,” one of them answers him, voice retracting and weak.

His tone doesn’t falter with the knowledge that they were too late to save someone.

“If either of you are infected, tell me now. We can help you, but we need to know,”

Clarke hears the sounds of bullets ringing and finding their targets, so she doesn’t stop shooting either.

“We’re not,”

“Show me your wrists and ankles. And your necks,”

Clarke wants to snap at him that they don’t have time for this, but she made that mistake with Charlotte and she took the rap for it. If this is what they have to do each time they find someone new then she’ll follow that order too.

They start shuffling and something other than howling rings through the hallway:

“Clarke,” Murphy calls from the other end of the corridor. She nods for them to come here and they both sprint down, covering the space behind her with aim she didn’t know they had. It’s not impeccable; it takes the two of them a couple of shots more than it should to hit flesh, but they aren’t incapable of keeping the walkers back.

Wells approaches, pushing past her to get to the girls, both of them leaning on either side of their doorway as they unroll their sleeves. Clarke peers into the room for a second, just to see a bed raised up on to two legs so that it can lean and cover the only window.

There is a door at the other end of the room, maybe leading to a bathroom, but it’s been locked and there’s a chair underneath the handle to stop anything getting through.

The chair is missing a leg- the shard of wood hanging from it looks a little too sharp for it not to have been used as a weapon. She tries to find the missing part somewhere on the floor, but she can’t.

Either they’ve got it, or they’ve lost it.

“Are either of you injured?” Wells asks, sounding like he’s done this thousands of times before.

“Just run down,” the blonde says, her knees sticking out awkwardly. “We haven’t eaten in days.”

“That’s okay,” he assures her and he’s reaching for the other girl as he speaks. “We’ll get you something.”

“Can you walk?” Miller questions.

Murphy keeps shooting and Clarke pushes further away from the room, both to get some of her arrows back and to make the wall of zombies retreat more.

“I guess we’ll have to,”

“Clarke, come on,” Wells calls, and she turns her head, whips it around so that her neck jolts. Miller is already leading the way out of the corridor, an arm under the shoulders of a young brunette, no older than twenty.

“Coming,”

She grabs the last few of her arrows from the faces of some nearby corpses, and her and Murphy keep cover for a couple moments, enough time for Miller and Wells to get the girls down to the second floor, because blocking those stairs up won’t help anything.

Murphy grabs on to her arm, yanks it to tell her to get a shift on, and she has to try not to ask about Roan and Bellamy. Now that they’ve found who they’re looking for, she can focus some more on the aftermath, and if her last conversation with him was in spite, she won’t forgive herself.

“They ran west like you said,” Murphy says breathlessly as they throw themselves down flight by flight.

“Did they get any distance between them?”

“He’s fast, Clarke,”

“I’ve already lost him once,” is all she can say to explain herself.

They tunnel back through the ground floor, kicking down a few wanderers as they struggle to process what’s coming towards them.

“I thought I’d have to cover your ass for the first couple of missions,” Murphy growls when they barrel through the fire escape, having fallen behind some more to stop anything from following the others, and they stop again in the doorway, blinded by the pink sun as it just starts to breach the horizon. “You could at least pretend you’re not some superhuman.”

She smirks at him as he shoots above her head, noticing the way the corners of his lips are lilting.

“You’re right. I’m sorry for taking care of myself,”

“When we get out of this,” he throws over his shoulder, before pausing to back up and slam the fire escape closed. “Me and you are gonna have words about faking comas.”

There are much fewer walkers outside now. Enough that they’re still under attack, not so many that Clarke considers herself in danger.

She doesn’t know where the four of them have escaped to, but as long as they’re out of sight, that’s all that matters.

They kill until there is nothing but quiet. Most of the horde must have evaporated off with the revelation that they might be letting a meal run away from them, and half of the remainders are trapped inside. Every other one is nothing more than a shell, a skeleton laced with dead tissue, and Clarke still hasn’t stopped for a breath.

She doesn’t let herself, even as Murphy slumps back against the wall, casts his eyes over their own personal graveyard, and pants.

Retrieving each protruding arrow, tugging with torn muscles and barely trembling fingertips, Clarke tries not to look into the faces of her victims.

Maybe she hasn’t followed _all_ of Roan’s orders. He said, pretty explicitly, that they shouldn’t wait around. Still, it’s done now.

She turns back around to her friend and reaches for him, offering her forearm for him to use as a lever to heave himself up with when her heart finally starts beating again.

“Where is she!?”

Clarke can’t remember the last time she saw Bellamy before she heard him. His voice is deadly. She doesn’t even have time to let the relief wash over her, the knowledge that he’s okay and alive settling only on to the surface of her skin as her eyes flick cautiously over to Murphy.

“Don’t fucking touch me, Roan! I am not leaving her,”

He’s around the side of the building, maybe tucked behind the shrubs that Miller and she had been using as cover.

“Clarke!” he roars. That’s all it is. Just a roar.

Her stomach jumps up to her throat and she doesn’t think. Everything about the last half hour has been survival. Survival hasn’t stopped.

She takes off, still listening out for the warning signs of any incoming zombies, any groaning stragglers, but he’s using that tone again. The same one he used in the gas station, that same panic and it’s all survival for him too.

“Bellamy!” she shouts when she’s rounded the side of the building and can’t see him. For one, detrimental second, she wonders if she’s imagined his voice. If she’s dreamt up her Bellamy for the sake of her own sanity, just so that she didn’t go crazy with the thought of him out there, without her, having to run for his life. But he answers her in the next, with her own name.

Her eyes are watery, clouded and blocking logic. She can’t find him. The direction his voice is coming from doesn’t hold him.

And then there’s a red car, scraping the edge of the parking lot that she left him in, and his hair is too long, and his face is too beautiful, and Clarke finds her breath.

She has a hand in her hair, clutching a clump of it in a fist in the haste of searching for him, and she hears the choked laugh she makes when she sees him, not even bothering to hide who he’s running to, who he’s running for.

She breaks into a sprint, throwing her bow over a shoulder and letting the strap sling from her chest as she escapes the burial grounds of a shitty hotel.

A year ago, she only ever ran when she had to. Now Clarke likes running. So her sprint is at full effort and clumsy, but that is pretty much irrelevant. She’s still tearing towards him, arms up to drive her forward, like she’s wading through loose water.

He is fast.

He was the fastest out of the five of them before.

Her sprint is nothing to his, the eighty liter pack, mere feathers on his back as he chases the air that sits closer to her than he does.

He’s grace without care. He’s together without bounds. He’s lightning.

“Clarke,” he calls again, and even though they’ve found each other, he still sounds just as panicked.

Maybe he thinks she’s just an apparition too.

When Bellamy’s chest hits hers, the impact is so hard that she expects to ricochet backwards, at least a little. It winds her, the force of both of them colliding at full speed. And yet his arms are like ropes against her back, tethered and bonded and keeping her from falling down. How far, she wouldn’t be able to guess.

Her feet aren’t on solid ground. They never were when he hugged her, but they aren’t now either. They are floating. He shoulders her weight and keeps it from crushing her and he soars her, rocks her, lets her know that falling is impossible.

And Bellamy breathes heavily, rushed, relieved, tucking his face into any place that it might fit. She squeezes his back with the grip that she managed to throw over his shoulders. She lets her hair cover the two of them, tickle down his neck as she presses her temple tightly to his.

“I thought-” he starts to say, soft against the space next to Clarke’s jaw. Her eyes are pressed so tightly shut that it may as well still be night because there are stars everywhere. If she doesn’t see those, she’ll see tears.

She shushes him and his fingers dig tighter into her sides, arms reaching as far around her as they possibly can, pressing her as close to him as humanly possible, her feet still unable to touch the ground.

The intensity of it all takes a whimper from her clamped lips. It touches his ear.

She’s breathing and he’s breathing too and everything, for one gorgeous moment, feels so easy.

“You’re here,” he whispers. She can’t tell what he’s trying to mean, whether this is comfort or acceptance or admission. She can’t even tell what ‘here’ he’s talking about. His arms are the only ‘here’ that makes any sense.

“You’re okay,” she tells him, brushing the center of her forehead against his temple, her nose grazing his cheekbone.

“Clarke,”

Maybe he doesn’t even realize he’s said her name again. It’s a sigh, almost like the hum someone makes before they’re about to fall asleep.

“It’s me,” Clarke assures. Her fingernails might be cutting into his neck.

He keeps swaying and someone fires their gun from somewhere, but the threat of Bellamy pulling away makes Clarke fist his shirt, the collar wrinkling underneath her scarred hand. And there’s no way he’s going to let go.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, so quiet, so barely-there, so delicate.

“I know,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'I'm crashing, I'm crashing right into you,'  
> \- Crashing into you, Vance Joy


	33. Walking eyes, and tearful skies are home again

She can’t hear his heart. She doesn’t need to. Honestly, the only thing she can hear is silence.

It’d be too much to focus on the sounds that surround them, or the crimson of the dawning sky, the rose of the sun being born again. She’s got rough stubble pressed so tightly against her own jaw that he’ll probably leave the imprint of it into her face.

Clarke’s nose is pressed snug into the point just before his ear, hair bleeding into one another’s. Light upon shadow, the eclipse that broke her heart.

His chest is rising and falling so heavily against hers. Clarke can’t figure out if she’s got his neck in a tighter grip or if his circle around her waist is more.

Bellamy must only be standing on one foot at a time, as he swings her, taking in turns to secure them to the ground.

Clarke can’t remember the last time she welcomed touch so intensely, so without hesitation, but she doesn’t try to think about it. She’s missed this too much. She’s wanted this for too long. To just have him, and for him to just have her. And to both just be content with this.

And just like every moment of quiet, and of peace that they’ve gotten since the beginning of the apocalypse, this one is cut short by the amplifying of gun fire, a reminder that they’re out in the open, exposed and too caught up in one another to protect themselves.

To Clarke, this is just Bellamy. And to Bellamy, this is just Clarke. But his arms slip up her back, palms coming flat behind her shoulders as he braces the both of them for the oncoming separation.

Clarke breathes in deeply and holds it when her hands slide over his shoulders. It’s too hard to completely let go, they both just stay holding on to each other’s elbows, slowly retracting themselves, but Clarke keeps his elbows in her hands so that he doesn’t just disappear again. And he does the same, maybe so she doesn’t either.

His boots are oddly fascinating. They should be moving, finding cover, but his feet are planted now that he’s not supporting her weight, and they’re less threatening than his eyes. They are laced, tied with bunny ears, floppy and pitch black against the brown leather.

Bellamy clears his throat, a little more timidly than he usually does it. The realization of what they’ve just done sinks in slowly, not a shock, not a jump. One minute they’re clutching each other like there is nothing else and the next the rest of the world is starting to seep back through.

Her relief turns into awkwardness, his desperation turns back into tension. His fingers are still digging into her elbows, but it’s the necessity of it.

“You were gonna run back inside,” she whispers, words slipping out before she can stop them.

A beat, her grip tightens.

“Obviously,” he mumbles, his feet shuffling forward so that her toes are overlapping his. Still with that need to support her. “You didn’t come out with Miller.”

“I needed to make sure he could get those girls out,”

Clarke’s head snaps up as she mentions them, but they aren’t visible behind Bellamy. No one is.

Something catches Bellamy’s eye behind her head, but he doesn’t seem like it’s an immediate threat.

“You got away?” she asks, irrelevant considering he’s standing right here in front of her.

“Yeah,” he nods, throat bobbing. “I didn’t want to uh-”

“What?”

“I wanted to be close,”

She knows what he means. It physically hurts when they are anything other than close. That was something that came about along the way, whether it was a flick of a switch or if it was slower, Clarke doesn’t care. It wasn’t unhealthy, or unnatural. It had always been just an authentic want, a knowledge that having a person, _that_ person, close just make things easier.

“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Clarke says, emotion reaching the top of her shoulders, bubbling up through her throat and almost cutting the words away. But she’s in control, and she’s reveling in her ability to say what she wants to him, to hold on to his arms, to feel relief and to feel accomplished and to feel good.

She doesn’t mind giving Bellamy that. She chose to say it. She won’t feel ashamed of saying anything so long as she chooses to say whatever it is.

Her lips turn up, shy, almost asking the rest of her face for the permission to smile. And she grants it, tentatively.

Her eyes flicker up from Bellamy’s chest to his eyes, and they’re dancing towards her. Threatening a smile, somewhere deep down.

He talks as though he’s letting out a sigh.

“Yeah, me too,” he breathes, and his eyes are locked on hers, trying to convince her of something, trying to tell Clarke something that he hasn’t found the words for. He blinks a little too quickly and clears his throat twice. “I mean you too. Well, I just- I’m just…”

Clarke watches him struggle. Her smile widens.

“You’re alive. That’s kind of…”

His eyebrows scrunch up together like he’s got a bad taste in his mouth.

“No, not kind of. It’s fucking amazing,”

She doesn’t have time to absorb any more of his expression, his dazed, almost disbelieving expression because a hand comes up to Bellamy’s shoulder and pushes him away from her, elbows slipping away from each other’s grasps and her smile drifts away with him.

Murphy’s other hand is between Clarke’s back and her bag, a resting post as though he’s worried she might fall over. She turns to him, failing to get what he’s doing before he can do it, and Bellamy goes stumbling back a few steps, just as surprised as she is.

“Watch it,” Murphy warns, not letting either of them say anything. His face is hard as stone, shooting daggers and knives towards Bellamy relentlessly. He’s got a foot between them both, a wall.

A wave of guilt floods through Clarke as she realizes she left Murphy behind back there. Not that there was going to be any immediate danger, none that he couldn’t handle himself, but she’d lost track of the whole world when she heard Bellamy shout.

Bellamy has recovered, shoulders tight, face blank again. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t back down from Murphy’s stare either.

It feels oddly like competition, but no one here is competing for anything.

“It’s okay,” Clarke says, stepping away from both of them as she adjusts her bag on her back from where it slipped in their embrace. “We should go,”

She looks around for the first time. The hotel, the space around it, is empty for now. They still have a responsibility to the survivors.

She marches past the both of them, letting Murphy know she isn’t going to prioritize the divide between them all for the sake of survival, and letting Bellamy know that she isn’t going to defend him against Murphy.

Clarke walks away from the hotel and towards the parking lot where they separated. She hadn’t expected to see the others so soon, thought it’d be more realistic for the pairs to just reunite back at the rover. This dynamic, the team, must be a little more functional than what she’d made it out to be to Roan.

They’re tucked behind a minivan, Miller on his feet and craning on tiptoes like he’s keeping a lookout for them, Roan and Wells catering to the two girls that have slumped against it.

She jogs over, slows down as she gets closer, and feels the other two catch up behind her. The blonde is the one to spot them, with Miller facing the opposite direction for some reason, and she mumbles something to Wells.

His head snaps over to them and Clarke watches his shoulders let go. He’s still preoccupied with checking them over, looking for injuries, so reconciliation will have to happen later.

“They can’t walk,” Roan decides, not sparing a glance to the new arrivals.

“We’ll carry them to the rover,” Bellamy keeps his distance from the girls, being even more of a stranger than the rest of them are since this is first time meeting them.

He could do that, Clarke thinks. He managed to carry her along with his backpack across borders.

Roan only shakes his head.

“Let’s just make camp for the day,”

“With a horde like that wandering around?”

“We’ll hear them before they get too close. They won’t come back here either. They’re hunting the ones that ran west,”

“Let’s at least get away from the hotel,” Clarke says, knowing that it won’t be any good to tell the girls that they’re being rescued only to keep them in the same place.

“We should go somewhere we can make a fire,” Wells says, looking around him.

“There are some woods about an hour’s walk from here,” Bellamy offers.

There isn’t much of a delay in getting the girls, almost unconscious already, to their feet and Bellamy takes the blonde while Roan carries the brunette- Maya, Clarke remembers catching.

They set off soon enough, no one questioning the decision to make camp. It’ll be a luxury, not a sure, affordable thing. It’s got to be rare, but perhaps this is what happens with civilian recoveries. A few hours of daylight won’t be too harmful.

She falls into step beside Wells as they lead the way in the same direction from which they’d come, and he pats her on the shoulder, almost a welcome home.

They make it to the woods that Bellamy was talking about- he must have remembered them from coming the opposite way. The trees are spinney, stumpy branches that tower through the low-hanging clouds.

If it were dark, they’d look like something out of a movie. This is the type of place, at the backend of a highway, where nobody would have ever really come to. People would have just driven past, never stopping, never bothering to consider the acres of land.

They walk for another twenty minutes into the heart of the trees, so that if any walkers come stumbling through from the highway, they’ll be more hidden. The girls have fallen asleep, but Clarke avoids looking over to Bellamy for the rest of the walk. She’s been rattled by whatever happened back there.

 _Fucking amazing_. He said it was fucking amazing that she’s still alive. That can’t mean he’s unhappy that she’s back, surely. Her heart beats a little faster each time she thinks about the possibility that he’s missed her.

His relief back there, it felt like more than survival.

He doesn’t seem affected by it. Not of what she can see, which isn’t a great deal considering she’s refusing to look back.

Once they’ve reached an area where the trees are packed tightly together, claustrophobic in a way so that they’re covered, the girls get laid down, Bellamy and Roan’s bags tucked underneath their heads for pillows.

“I’ll start a fire,” Murphy offers, not sounding like he’s doing a favor for anyone else but himself. Wells goes with him to help collect firewood.

“They need to eat,”

“I’ve brought extra rations,” Roan shrugs, stretching his arms out in big circles.

“Something proper,” Clarke corrects herself and looks around, up to the branches of the trees. “I’m gonna go catch something.”

She turns on her heels, loads her bow once she’s left her flask down by the blonde girl’s arms.

“Go with her,” she hears Roan mutter to someone, and she prays he’s talking to Miller.

Heavy footsteps follow the route Clarke has already taken as she leaves behind the cluster of packs and sleeping survivors. She doesn’t want Bellamy around her. She knows the lack of self-control that she’s got with him and it’s dangerous.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Clarke tells whoever it is, knows it’s him in spite of not seeing.

She gets ignored.

Clarke focuses on the sounds coming from the treetops. These are the kinds of trees that squirrels live in, it’s just a matter of waiting around for one to pass by. She keeps walking, following trunk to trunk as she listens.

It takes barely five minutes for his marching to become ridiculous.

“You’re scaring the food away,” she tells him, matter-of-factly.

“How so?” Bellamy asks, half-amused, half-curious.

“Listen,”

Clarke hears him stop to catch the sound she’s talking about, but she carries on walking anyway, just to widen the gap between them both. A few moments pass before he’s jogging to catch up again, joining her side this time.

“Couldn’t hear anything,” he says, shrugging.

She rolls her eyes. His shoulder nudges hers at the same time as a twig snaps ahead of them in the distance, and Clarke doesn’t know which one is the one to make her flinch.

Bellamy steps in front of her quicker than she can react, perhaps before he even realizes what he’s doing, and the arm that isn’t carrying his gun swings behind his body, reaching for Clarke, a protective, shielding gesture.

“Sh,” he hums next, hand falling slack near Clarke’s stomach, arm still extended. “Food.”

“Move then,”

He doesn’t and Clarke pushes against his shoulder to get him out of the way so that she can shoot whatever he’s seen.

“So I need protecting from a squirrel now?” she asks him once it has got an arrow sticking out of its eye, sideways on the ground with its paws up.

“No,”

Clarke breezes past him again, the thin layer of air between their shoulders shuddering. She stops at the corpse when his footsteps start to get closer.

“You don’t need to follow me around,” she wants to make clear. “I can look after myself.”

The number of times she’s said that one sentence, saying it again won’t hurt anything. She doesn’t need to be treated like a raggedy Anne doll, with the red scraps of hair hanging by their threads, button eyes long gone.

Clarke doesn’t look around to him, but she can picture the screwed up ball of his lips.

“Last time you said that…”

“What?” she whirls around, squirrel forgotten, two feet away from Bellamy as he clutches to his weapon and as she clutches to hers. “I died? Well I also told you that I was proud of you. I’m not God Bellamy. I can be wrong sometimes. It’s _not_ your job to keep me alive.”

‘Not anymore,’ lingers in the air between them but it’s wrong. It was never his job to keep her alive.

‘Not ever,’ fits better.

“Last I checked, we’re on the same team here,” he counters, shoulders back, eyes cast to the ground in front of him, hand gesturing flippantly behind him back to the camp space.

“And if I had it my way, I would be nowhere near you,”

“But you’re not. You’re here and you’re alone in the woods,”

“Yeah well,” Clarke sighs, smiling ruefully, stepping forward so that he sees the cynicism in her eyes. “I’ve gotten pretty good at being alone.”

Bellamy considers her and narrows his eyes while she watches him for a reaction.

She jumps when he swings and chucks his gun to the ground, the black ridges of it reflecting the sun.

“Prove it,” he says as he rounds back.

“What?”

Clarke blinks, and blinks again as he waits for her to see what he wants her to see.

“Prove it. Show me that you can take care of yourself,”

It clicks slowly, a tentative push of the light switch, when it balances on the edge of being off and on just to stop from flicking too loudly.

“What do you want me to do, Bellamy?” she smirks, arms folding across her chest. “You want me to hit you? You want me to fight you?”

She’s taunting him and it’s bitter, but his eyes are glazed over with focus and he’s set on this.

“You said it yourself, your bow is your lifeline,” all those months ago, all those lifetimes ago. “You haven’t got that, you can’t save everyone. You said that. Show you’re more,”

“This isn’t going to prove anything,” Clarke tells him, a reminder, tired and reluctant, but Bellamy only raises his eyebrows in challenge, and he knows just how to play her.

He knows the way to make sure she won’t back down, and it’s by making her feel like he doesn’t think she’s strong enough. And she sees behind that front, she can see an excitement that wouldn’t be there if he expects her to be weak. No, Bellamy wants to see her strength. She knows just how to play him too.

Clarke steps closer, a foot between the two of them.

She chucks her bow to the side and shrugs away the quiver behind her back.

She’s not going to punch him.

She thinks back to what Octavia taught her, in the hours of grueling self-defense lessons, nights spent bored in a cottage with sufficient floorspace. Watch shifts that needed some form of entertainment so that they wouldn’t fall asleep.

She moves her foot across her body and hooks an ankle around his own. She just wants him on the floor as soon as she can get him down. Her boot knocks against his, flicking her leg back towards herself in an attempt to swipe his foot out from under him.

Bellamy pre-empts it, and takes the hand that Clarke uses to brace herself on his shoulder in his. Her foot gets locked behind his leg as he spins her around to face the other way. One fluid movement and he’s already got back all of the control.

Clarke feels Bellamy step closer as he keeps her wrist tightly in his grip, twisting her arm around and bringing it up so that the ball of her fist grazes her back. There’s a stretch in her shoulder; uncomfortable, certainly there, but not painful enough to be called actual hurt.

There is a risk in making that pain worse when she does what she does next, but Clarke drops down to her knee so that he gets thrown off guard, and she reaches up with her spare arm to jab him in the stomach. Her elbow is sharper than it is forceful, enough to draw a low grunt from him.

She smirks at that and takes the chance to shove out of his loosened grip, taking his wrist in hers and mirroring exactly what he did to her so that she doesn’t get his expression and so he doesn’t get her faint hint of a smile, an exhilarated, frustrated smile.

She’s nowhere near as powerful as he is, but his arm is still twisted uncomfortably. Bellamy uses his stupidly long legs to get back, to swipe out from under both her feet and Clarke sees the world turn upside down as her head careens towards the ground.

And then there’s a hand against the side of her head and it stops her from hitting hardened dry mud, and she wants to actually punch him.

She’s dropped his arm and in the time it took him to get his footing again, Bellamy has managed to turn back and catch her, stop her from falling.

Clarke’s back lands heavily, as does the rest of her body, but her head is safe above the flat of his palm, above the solid spread of his fingers. And his other arm is coming to wrap around the outside of her ribcage to keep her up higher.

“You’re not going easy on me now, are you?” she asks when she gets a glimpse of his face, the focus on the surface, the amusement in the depths.

“Why would you think that?” he smirks back, and Clarke has missed how the corner of his mouth would do that thing.

She can feel the heat of his breath on her cheeks, that close, not close enough. He loses that focus for a second, or maybe he gets more focused, and Clarke brings her foot up to lodge itself into the space between his waist and his hip, catching it with her toes and launching him over her head. She’s not sure, in fact, she really does doubt that it’s effective or elegant or how that is meant to be done, but it’s a distraction taking advantage of a distraction.

She cranes her head back from the top of it, letting the world go the wrong way around again, to see Bellamy roll on to the soles of his feet and brace himself with a fist against the ground, head up, tilted to work out what to do next.

Clarke jumps to her feet, realizing that grinning at Bellamy upside down isn’t going to help her with actually winning, and he’s up too when she turns to face him again. She marches up to him, takes his neck in her hand, feels the ball in his throat shrug and she’s merely using it as a brace to throw him off again and his arm comes up to hit her away in a flash, to block her from the next move, so she gets more offensive, uses her elbow to poke at his chest. Bellamy spins to take it with his shoulder and so Clarke counters that, making the angle between them smaller as she drives a knee up into his stomach.

And it’s all happening so fast, such a rat-a-tat of movements that it takes more than just a reflex to realize the hold he’s got on her thigh, fingers wrapped around and holding her knee against him. Pulling Clarke closer, keeping her from repeating the hit, but he doesn’t let her foot touch the ground and he forces her to lean into him, to let him support her with his weight beneath hers.

His hand is so secure around the muscle of her upper thigh and Clarke needs to use it to her advantage.

She leans closer, pushes in and his hold takes her weight as her other leg lifts to wrap itself around his waist.

It’s meant to tip him backwards, to pin him down to the ground. It’s simple laws of physics that he should be falling now.

It’s logic with which Clarke slips her leg around his side, expecting her foot to land solid against ground when he loses balance, but he doesn’t lose balance.

And the hand she has on the back of his shoulder sinks further down to push against him, but he’s pushing too.

They’ve both lost their breaths, both have their faces flushed and Clarke’s hairline is starting to dampen as she’s lifting up above him. He tilts his head up to meet her, to keep watching, and she wants to run her fingers through the curls that tumble over his eyebrows, that trifle with his ears.

Her leg tightens over his hip, his hand shifts to support the underneath of her thigh.

Clarke moves quickly, so she doesn’t lose balance either, when her palm lands at the junction between his neck and his shoulder, one hand fisted into the back of his shirt, the other tight against his collar.

Their eyes meet for the first time, and Clarke’s glance upward is tentative, nervous, and she fears the way his eyes are so clear. He breathes heavily, mouth wide open and they tumble down to her mouth for a moment.

He meets her gaze again, and she tries to hold it, but his lips are more dainty than she’d remembered, and they look soft and fragile, and ready.

And Bellamy’s fingers dig into space that might be leading too high to be her thigh, almost as a pleading.

She leans into him and he is steadily fixed on the relaxed way her lips are moving forward. And his forehead touches hers and her nose brushes his and Clarke breathes in when her foot comes up even higher to make contact with his shoulder.

It’s not how strongly she kicks against him. It’s partly thanks to the placement, of throwing him off center from so high up, and she’s got the element of surprise.

Bellamy reels from the force of it, but he doesn’t once let go of her leg, like he’s been expecting her to do this. He catches himself with his other hand behind his back but slumps against the ground once he knows he’s not going to smash the back of his head against it.

He keeps his eyes on Clarke’s face as she falls too, her knee sticking to his stomach. Sitting up straight, almost as though he can’t not be close to her, his palm still on the underside of her leg, Bellamy doesn’t look too affected by the fall.

Clarke’s hand grapples against the loose twigs and the sparse tufts of grass as she searches for his other hand. Grip still on his shoulder, slipping back and disappearing behind him and trailing down his spine as she slides closer, still above him.

His hair is so unexplainably tousled, his eyes so irrefutably glazed over, his smile so detrimentally _there_.

Neither of them watch their hands as they meet on the ground, too focused on hunting the challenge in the eyes of the other, but Bellamy turns his over so that her fingertips can flow like water over his palm.

There was a rhyme about teddy bears that she used to know. The cycle in his palm reminds her of the warmth of those teddy bears. Yet Clarke tears away from it to rise up his forearm, and she feels goose bumps along the trail of his skin, ones that shouldn’t be there in the heat of summer.

Bellamy leans away as Clarke leans forward, maintaining the delicate equilibrium held between them, between their lungs, and his arm bends so that their hands will meet again as his head comes to rest against the flat.

Clarke tangles their fingers together. Bellamy holds on so tightly that she’s worried he’s going to break them, but it doesn’t hurt.

She brings his arm over his head, locking it down above him, leaning on it with some of her weight since she’s got her face inches away from his, and then she’s got him right where he needs to be.

She pushes herself up, knee pinning him securely to the ground, weight almost completely on his chest now, so much so that his breath coming out is ragged and labored, literally forcing the air from his lungs.

Satisfaction dawns over his expression as he takes her in.

He lost. Clarke won. Yet Bellamy is the smug one.

His eyes are wet. They are glistening and the clouds have been hanging low today but they’re reflecting scattered light, shining colors that break away and shatter the conformity of sunlight.

And Clarke wants him.

“Not that I needed to prove anything to you,” she says, clearing her throat and wiping away the foolish grin with that. “But I think I just kicked your ass.”

Bellamy takes his lip between his teeth to get rid of his mirroring smile, but his eyes stay like wells, endless to someone who wants to believe that wishing on such a thing brings hope.

“Somehow,” he mumbles, and has to wait for his voice to not crack before he can trust it again. His irises dart back to the purse of her lips during the interval before they rise. “I don’t think those tactics are gonna work on anyone…”

Clarke expects him to say ‘else’.

“Dead,”

“You’re so sure?”

“I’m pretty sure,”

“I thought it was pretty effective,”

“Oh,” he pretends to consider. “It was definitely that. Walkers aren’t gonna be so easily distracted.”

“You calling yourself easy?”

“I’m calling you distracting,”

His eyes are squinted as his chest wriggles a little underneath her knee. She’s got his wrist clipped to the ground and Clarke has forgotten about his other one, the one he’s been using to hold on to her thigh, and he moves too quickly for Clarke to block anything.

Bellamy rolls the both of them over fluidly, shifting his grip up to her hip and he’d be throwing her to the ground if he wasn’t so solid.

Clarke’s back hits the ground and the impact forces a heavy grunt from her lips; she winces from the surprise of it, but she recovers quickly because Bellamy follows with ease, five steps ahead of whatever Clarke thought she’d gotten away with.

He doesn’t need to pin her down using his knee on her stomach. He can do that with just the expanse of his body over hers, knees touching knees, his elbow up by her chin, his forearm all along hers to keep it down over her head.

Clarke doesn’t have a choice in whether she’s going to look into his eyes, to meet brown that still looks like it might start bleeding out. His eyes are the only thing that fit into the world of her sight.

“Not distracting enough, then?” she asks him, the back of her head slumping against the ground in defeat.

Bellamy smirks, still proud, still genuine. She wants to know why he could have been crying a second ago.

“What the fuck?”

Clarke moves to sit up at the sound of Murphy’s voice, but Bellamy is slower in his reaction and her forehead ends up colliding with his. It’s a cold, searing sort of pain that makes things go starry for a moment, but she’s got bigger things to deal with right now.

Bellamy winces, and the realization that he’s completely on top of her floods through Clarke’s bruising mind. She pushes at his shoulder to get the two of them out of the awkward position, and she jumps up to her feet before he’s even noticed Murphy standing, seething from a few feet away.

“Clarke?” he asks, eyes focused solely on her and they’re cold. He’s angry at her.

She knows what this must look like; their weapons dropped casually off to the side, food forgotten, wrapped up in one another.

That’s not what it was. That’s not what it would be. They were fighting.

Bellamy gets up to his feet slowly and she catches his expression from the corner of his eye, the way he stayed sat on the ground with his shoulders hanging low, disappointed perhaps, if Clarke can give herself that much.

She picks up her bow and stalks over to the long abandoned squirrel, swinging her arrows over her back and using the one sticking out of its eye as a lever to lift it.

This Murphy looks an awful lot like the one they found in Nebraska, and Clarke tries not to wonder when it was that they all drifted back to this.

Was it all in her imagination that they might have actually grown a little over those months spent together? Murphy surely grew, he’s opened up, told her about his life.

“It’s okay,” she tells him, naively wanting him to not be angry.

“Are you kidding?”

“Leave it Murphy,” Bellamy growls from behind Clarke. She is literally in between the two of them and she hates it. They don’t _need_ it.

“ _You_ don’t get to say shit,”

“What’s it to you?”

“Watch it, Blake,”

Murphy steps forward and he might be giving cold to Clarke but he’s giving flames to Bellamy.

“You didn’t need to follow us,” Bellamy seems to remind him, not giving anything away.

Murphy nods his head condescendingly, his lips twisting.

“So you get her alone, tell her whatever shit you can think of to convince her to take you back-”

Clarke bristles.

“That is not what-”

“I saw you!” raising his voice a little, Murphy gestures violently to the place where she’d been flat underneath the subject of his hate.

“We were fighting,” she sighs, exasperated as her face screws up.

“Fighting?”

“Uh… self-defense,” Clarke guesses. Bellamy shuffles around behind her but she ignores him; he isn’t the concern. “Murphy you have got to start trusting me with this. You can’t be…” she tries to figure out how to phrase it. “My shelter from his storm, okay? You can’t protect me from him, you can’t expect to do that. Listen,”

The ice is beginning to melt.

“It’s my job, not yours,”

“Hey,” Bellamy snaps, scoffing, clearly insulted. “You don’t need protecting from me.”

He spits the words to Murphy and spits outrage along with it.

“Then what is my job?” Murphy asks, ignoring him.

“To be my friend. And you are a good friend. You were the one to tell everyone that I can look after myself, but you have to start letting me do that. Or I will forever be the girl who got stuck in a coma, or the girl who died twice over, or got abandoned by half of her family,”

“Clarke I wouldn’t put you in danger,” Bellamy tries again, pushing over to her side so that they’re forming a U-shape.

“Leave it,” she snaps at him, not even bothering to look. She’s got guilt flooding through her veins. What happened moments ago was only one thing; it was indulgence. Bellamy Blake is addictive and spending time with him makes her forget what he’s done already. Strength isn’t submitting to the mask he wears when he’s with her.

“No,” he says simply.

She makes hurried eye contact with Murphy, and he’s asking her a silent question: a ‘do you want me to step in?’, and she doesn’t.

“I’m going to say one thing,” he says slowly. “And then you’re dead to me, you got that?” he asks Bellamy.

Clarke’s permission isn’t something that should even be a thing. It isn’t up to her whether or not he speaks, just as long as he doesn’t try to become her human shield.

She doesn’t want a human shield.

It’s all very complicated. She’ll never quite be able to figure out what is going on between her and Bellamy, what’s left of them, what is going to happen in the future. And while that uncertainty lingers, Murphy cannot dictate what they are to each other. He is free to dictate what he is to Bellamy, and what he is to Octavia, but Clarke has had a delay in all of this.

Murphy turns away from Clarke, from where they were stood opposite each other, steps closer to Bellamy so that he’s almost nose to nose with him. Both of them are wearing clenched jaws; Clarke can hear their teeth snapping.

She knows why this isn’t a competition. This sort of situation, it usually involves two people fighting over someone they both want. Neither of them want Clarke, not like that anyway.

It’d be funny to someone on the outside, the absurdity of all of this.

She’s just a girl who slept for too long and missed too many important things to really have an input. Bellamy is just a man who is holding cards to his chest so close that people have folded on him, and Murphy is a man clinging to the rations of what he can call emotion. He’ll never want emotion, but humanity is so obscure in this world, maybe he needs it.

Absurd.

Bellamy juts his chin out, not backing down from the scrawny man in front of him. Clarke feels her toes tingle in her boots.

“You don’t deserve her,” he says quietly. Bellamy doesn’t even flinch. “And I wanted to be wrong. I don’t understand how you can dare to look her in the eye after months of radio-fucking-silence. Feeling responsible for her safety, _cuddling_ when you see she’s alive, making her laugh, holding her up, none of that is kind. You put you first when we got to Vancouver, and you’re putting you first now. Clarke has people that have shown, that have proved that they love her-”

“Oh, you love her now?” Bellamy’s voice is shivering, rattling inside of a cage.

“Of course I do!” a pause as Clarke’s jaw drops and Murphy swallows. “Atonement feels really good. If you want to keep being selfish, give her that at least.”

“And if I don’t?” Bellamy mumbles, so quietly that Clarke almost misses it, like he doesn’t want her to hear it.

“Don’t what?” Murphy sounds skeptical, not sure which bit he’s talking about.

“If I don’t want to be selfish?” his voice gets even smaller, his neck turning red as he tries to keep it between only the two of them again.

Murphy just snorts, brash and unforgiving.

“Then I don’t know, man. Try and find a way to go back in time,”

He spins on his heels and marches away with that, not bothering to ask if Clarke is going to follow him.

She waits until his footsteps have faded into nothing but the sounds of Bellamy breathing, and she really can’t even look at him.

Shame is radiating from her body.

“Atonement,” she scoffs to her sweeping foot on the ground. “I told Raven that that’s what Octavia wants.”

She senses Bellamy hovering, probably looking at his own feet.

They have food. The squirrel is probably too small to share between the eight of them, but the point is that the girls are going to have something warm and substantial. Clarke has eaten enough squirrels to last her a lifetime.

“You’re the only one out of all of us not looking for redemption, Bellamy,”

She turns and starts to head back to camp. He follows a couple of steps behind.

“It’s not like that,” he mumbles after long enough for Clarke to have given up on waiting for him to say something.

“Whatever,”

“Clarke-”

“He’s right. He was right all along, and he shouldn’t have been,”

“I know,”

So silence hangs over them the rest of the way back, and Clarke looks at the mountain of fire, wonders how long it’s been since she’s seen one of them, and she doesn’t need the heat of it today. The sun shining from nowhere, watching somewhere from low hanging clouds, is more than enough. She crashes down against a tree trunk after she’s thrown the speared squirrel down to Roan’s feet, and she wants to sleep.

They can witness her nightmares for a few hours. They probably get them too. She hasn’t slept in almost a week, and she is walking dead on her feet.

She’s sore and being thrown around Bellamy’s shoulders is exercise that a week without sleep hasn’t helped. Wells comes to sit down next to her, her head near his thigh.

“Sleep,” he says, eyes trained on the rest of them scattered in the close circle.

“Where’s Murphy?” Clarke asks, leaning her forehead into his hip.

“I’m here,” calls from somewhere distantly over the fire.

 “And Miller?”

“He’s asleep, Clarke,”

“And the girls, they’re okay?”

“They’ll be fine. Quit worrying,”

“You shouldn’t be left alone,” she reminds him, yawning.

“Huh?”

“The four of you. S’dangerous,”

“We’ll get by,”

“No fighting,”

Clarke lets herself slip pretty soon after that, with Wells’ warmth hovering close by and the sparkling of the fire around.

She is running for a while, the kind of sprint that doesn’t let you breathe for anything. She’s running through trees with branches that whip at her face like wasp stings and she doesn’t know if she’s running away from something or towards another.

The clouds are following the path she takes. Rain is distant until it isn’t; right over her head and soaking her through to the bone. Rain brings with it the voices, carries the heaviness of water along with heckles and callous, unyielding accusations.

They begin as Raven. Raven tells her that Clarke forced her to put her life on hold, and to cut out one of her closest friends for the sake of their relationship. Murphy comes in and lets Clarke know that she was naïve and deluded before her coma, that trust and love are weaknesses that aren’t worth the pain they cause. Wells says that he was better off when he didn’t know whether she was alive or not, because at least he had something to fight for then.

Bellamy promises that he isn’t coming back to her. Bellamy gives her his unhappiness and his tiredness, and she’s forced to watch him carry hers for a while.

It’s all held inside the rain. The only thing Clarke can do is run and feel the water seep into her skin, get absorbed by flesh that isn’t worthy of the blood it carries.

She wakes up in the way she does every morning, face flushed, and voice gone, hands fisted so hard in her hair that she’s tearing at the scalp and ripping strands away. Her dream dies along with her scream, and Wells is sat over by the fire with everyone else, including the two girls they’ve picked up.

Murphy turns around when Clarke gains silence back and he doesn’t look surprised to see her panting and graced with remnants of fear. He winces but nods her over to where they all are gathered.

Standing shakily to her feet, Clarke slides her bow over her shoulder but leaves the rest of her stuff next to the tree before she’s walking towards them. She takes the space of grass next to him, squeezing between him and Roan, who is prodding at the fire.

Nobody really says anything. Clarke wonders if it’s been this quiet the entire time, or if they’re unnerved by her now that they’ve listened to the terrors she sees when she sleeps.

More than anything though, she’s annoyed that she was the only one they let sleep. The sky is darker now; maybe late afternoon. They’ll have a few hours before they have to leave again.

“Don’t let me sleep in,” she scowls, looking to find the center of the pyramid.

Miller tosses another small twig into the fire.

“You call that sleeping?”

She levels him with a glare, but he reaches over with a small rectangular bowl in his hand.

“Eat,” he offers, and she takes it.

There is a pile of purple beans and a handful of rice underneath a portion of the squirrel she’d killed earlier. There’s too much meat sliced in this tray for it to have been shared evenly between eight people.

“I take it you all had this much?” she asks with one raised eyebrow, taking the plastic spoon and shoving a lump of rice into her mouth, avoiding the meat despite how appealing it is.

Wells sighs on Miller’s side, scrubbing his boots with something brash and wiry. The two girls are sandwiched between him and Bellamy, both of them with their arms around the other and underneath one jacket. It’s not cold. It’s just shock, Clarke guesses.

“Just eat it, Clarke,” Wells tells her, patient but tested.

The girls are opposite her, and they’re watching the fire, so focused that it makes her feel like they’re avoiding looking at her.

“I’m Clarke,” she offers, loud enough for them to know that she’s talking to them.

One of them, the taller, the blonde, looks up.

“We know,”

“What’re your names?”

“I’m Harper. This is Maya,” the brunette lifts her head too, nervously glancing at Clarke and to the rest of the circle.

“How long were you together?” she asks, casually with her food on one side of her mouth.

“Five months,” Harper, with heavy eyes and part of her eyebrow shaved, says. “We travelled up from New York.”

“That’s impressive,” Clarke makes sure to tell them that. Making it at all after this long is impressive.

She hums, not condescendingly but knowingly.

“Not as far as New Orleans,” Harper seems to want to remind her.

Clarke looks down to her food for a moment, working out how they know about her, how much they know about her journey. It’d be nice not to be the dead girl for once.

“How much have they told you?” she asks instead, trying to change subject.

“About?”

“Vancouver,”

“There’s a safehouse where we can stay,” she says, looking to Roan as if to make clear she’s struggling to remember the answers for a test. “They said we have to work but that it’s clean and you’ve got food and protectors,”

“Yeah,” Clarke half-smiles. “They do. It’s safe. You won’t have to look after yourselves anymore.”

Neither of them look particularly like fighters. She doubts they’ll be joining Ark any time soon, nor will they want to.

“I’m just excited to not have to sleep with one eye open,” the other girl, Maya, mumbles, getting louder as she speaks. There’s a timid smile on her face that gets caught by the tips of the flames. “They have beds right?”

“Right. And showers,”

“Showers?”

Clarke nods, taking another spoonful.

“Warm showers?” Maya sounds riddled with disbelief, rightly skeptical.

Clarke has to wince at that. She tries to make it seem apologetic, as she figures out how to put into words that they don’t quite have that luxury, but Murphy snorts at the expression she’s making and the laugh ricochets around the circle.

She mustn’t have done a very good job at being subtle.

“I guess warmth is relative,” she decides, smiling behind the words at hearing the group’s amusement. She doesn’t look at Bellamy, but she can feel his smirk.

“To what?” Maya seems entertained more than put out.

“How cold you are,”

“So not warm then?”

“No. Not warm,”

Neither of them seem to mind too much. The sleep, food, and fire have been good for them. They look a lot healthier than they had mere hours ago. There won’t be a delay in setting off, and neither of them are injured beyond the normal wear and tear.

 

…

 

The fire becomes so important once she’s fallen asleep. The idea, one conceived out of very poor logic, is to just keep building it. Maybe if he builds it high enough, Bellamy will be able to get it to reach out to Clarke and give her the ease of combustion that might soothe her nightmares.

She’s in pain. He’s read, in romance, that a man in love can often transform the pain of his lover into pain of his own, and he’s always thought of it as a little dramatic. Seeing Clarke’s face fall apart in agony, seeing tears roll down her cheeks, the rarity of them because she’d never let them slip if she could help it, and hearing her whimpers, he’s starting to understand what that meant.

There’s three of them left standing. Wells is asleep with his head slumped against the trunk of Clarke’s tree; his knee bent up for her body to curve around. They aren’t really touching, more just fitting to the shape of the other, and Bellamy doesn’t let himself obsess over it. He has absolutely no right to jealousy anymore.

What Bellamy does let bother him, is the pain written all over her face, because there’s no way he could ever convince himself to be alright with it. He’s had to watch her fight for her life, in the wild and in a hospital bed, and the pain she wore like it was sculpted just for her, was immeasurable.

And he couldn’t feel it. Bellamy couldn’t take it for himself no matter how hard he tried to. Pain isn’t a wave; it doesn’t flow in the way people think it does. There’s no transfer or direction or amplitude to it. Pain is binary. It is there or it isn’t, like a light switch. And Clarke’s light is always on.

And it hurt that he couldn’t absorb her pain. It made everything so much harder. If it could just be _him_ , if he were the one to have to deal with all of this, then it wouldn’t have affected them as much as it has.

So he’s building the fire to stop her shivering, even though it’s June and it’s hot enough without it, and she’s not shivering because she’s cold.

Murphy and Roan are minding their own business, none of them bothering to make conversation. They come from different people.

Bellamy channels what he said. He’s heard it so many times, that torture, that eventually he might become numb to it. Maybe being told ‘she deserves more than what you are’ one more time will turn that dig into healing.

Murphy stands to his feet and doesn’t look around before he’s shrugging away to the pile of their things, grabbing his pack and punching at it until it’s in the shape of something that can hold his head comfortably. He wasn’t lying about erasing Bellamy’s existence from his life. He’s given up.

Good. Perhaps now that Murphy has lost hope, Clarke will give up on him too.

“Jesus Christ,” Roan groans after a while of listening to her. Bellamy had picked up on how Clarke hasn’t been sleeping this week, and he managed to guess at why pretty early on. “I can’t hear this.”

He picks himself up, kicks at Wells harshly and doesn’t bother to say anything before he’s settling down as far from Clarke as he can get: as far away from her nightmares as possible.

Wells takes his place, extracting himself from Clarke, wearing a grimace when he realizes the pain she’s in.

They’re silent for some time more. Bellamy doesn’t see anything that they’d be able to talk about. He just wants to be there for her in the way he can’t be anymore.

Wells isn’t shy about watching Clarke, like he’s examining and analyzing the state of her. Bellamy can’t understand how he can be so neutral about watching someone he loves being tortured. They should just go and wake her up, but she hasn’t slept in so long. Perhaps sleep like this is just… necessary now.

“This is hurting you,” Wells says. Bellamy has taken to carving up the ground with a knife, and he stabs it a little too harshly into the dried mud when she sobs for the fiftieth time. He doesn’t say it like a question.

“Of course it is,”

He won’t try to hide it. A fool could see the effect Clarke’s pain has on him.

Wells shakes his head, like a father scolding his son would.

“You treat her like she’s nothing to you until it actually matters… I’m trying to figure it all out,”

Bellamy stays silent. He hasn’t got any sort of answer.

“You owe her an explanation, you know that, right? She deserves more than what you’re doing,”

Of course he knows that, but it’s another tally to the chart of the countless times he’s been reminded of it. Bellamy checks to see if it hurts any less; it doesn’t.

“It’s almost like you want her to hate you,” he says curiously, mildly. “You want her to hate you, but you were willing to go back for her,”

Maybe he did want that. Not anymore. He kicks himself inwardly, repeating the ‘too late’ mantra in his head.

“Can I ask you something?” Bellamy tries, ducking his head to the pattern he’s carving into the ground between his legs. “You’ve known each other since you were kids-”

“Since birth,”

“All that time,” he smiles, without emotion. There should be serenity to the emptiness of right now: both of them hunched over a fire that can crack and speak whenever it wants to, that can glow louder than they can. They should be able to regard the soft breeze as something calming, something without too much of a current since it is too weak to blow the fire out. The wind carries with it Clarke’s hurt. “Never once?”

Wells knows exactly what he’s talking about. It doesn’t need to be spoken. Bellamy has seen how they act around one another: with ease that only exists around people who have known each other all their lives. It could be the way he and Octavia are together, but Clarke was leaving his room in the early morning the other day, and she thinks he’s _suave_.

Wells smiles shyly, knowingly, picturing it. If they were to get together, Bellamy doesn’t know if he could really be that bothered by it. Apart from the whole heart breaking thing, but that’s happened so many times in the past few months that he might be used to it by the time he finds out they’re an item. Wells would be good for Clarke. He knows her, understands her, and he _keeps her alive_.

That’s pretty important.

“Eighth grade,” he gives, grinning at the thought of it. Bellamy wonders if he’s being granted permission to share in the joke.

“She ever know?”

“She didn’t want to know,” he says, still smiling.

Bellamy’s eyes flicker over to her as he chokes down a laugh.

“Sounds familiar,” he muses, thinking back to all the times she brushed him away in favor of ignorance. Her body lurches to turn to the side, her arm sprawling out in front as she reaches for something.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because that means you know what it feels like,”

“What?”

He can’t finish that. He can’t voice what it feels like to lose Clarke, to lose the Clarke you’re in love with. Wells had to see her die twice, so he’s felt that too.

“Are you ever going to tell her?” Wells asks, patiently, so different from their last conversation, which ended in him beating Bellamy to shreds. Rightly so. “You know you, uh,” he smiles looking up, as though laughing at himself for whatever he’s about to say, like he’s worried about what it would sound like. “You look at her like she hung the stars in the sky. That’s why Murphy lost it that first time,”

In the mess hall. God, what a fucking mistake that was.

“And she doesn’t know anything,” he reminds, as though Bellamy had forgotten that. “If you don’t want her in that way anymore then fine, but you pushing her away like this is doing nothing for either of you.”

“It’s better this way,” Bellamy shrugs, tired of no one knowing. “She’ll move on eventually and find someone who can make her happy.”

Maybe she already has, he wants to say, wants to let Wells know that them being together isn’t going to be an omen. That was the whole point of all of this: for Clarke to just move on. He was so wrong about it all. He’d forgotten what hate is.

“She told me she already did,” Wells whispers.

“I was never going to be good enough and I was a fool for ignoring that,” he says flippantly, breathing heavily to make it sound sweeping. It’s not everything: it’s a summary. But it’s something, a poignant something.

“Is that why?”

Bellamy watches the fire churn and waits for that small bit of something to sink into the air.

“What about you?” he asks when he realizes he’s not going to get an answer. “What happens when she does move on. Because she will, Bellamy. She won’t wait for you forever,”

Good. She shouldn’t have to.

“I don’t have to move on,” he tries to reason, knowing it’s his truth. “She’s it for me.”

That’s it. It’s that simple.

“And what if you’re it for her too?”

“I can’t be. She fought too hard not to end up with a coward,”

“You’re not a coward,”

“Aren’t I?” Bellamy asks, smiling wryly.

Wells takes his time to consider, mirroring his expression.

“You don’t have to be,”

“Murphy said it the night before we were found,” he sighs. Murphy said a lot of shit during those first few weeks of Vancouver. The list is too long to recount all in one watch shift. “My love is wrong.”

Wells sighs too, sounding resigned and like he’s thought too much about this lately.

“I don’t think love is right or wrong, certainly not anymore. It’s just not that simple. There’s no wrong way to love someone,” he hesitates, casting flickering eyes over to Bellamy who meets them. Wells deserves at least that, what with the time he’s giving. “You love her?”

Bellamy doesn’t drop his gaze. There’s no way he can say it out here, in the center of all of these sleeping bodies, with only a fire to drown it out. He hopes his eyes say enough. There can only be one answer to that question. It was inevitable, after all.

“So what’s the plan?”

Bellamy shrugs, trying to remember when he actually thought ahead.

“Keep her alive for as long as I can,” he settles. There’s more. There needs to be so much more than that. This morning made him see that. But for now, he can only give the thing he knows with one hundred percent clarity. “I’m not going to let her die again.”

Out of everyone left on this Earth, Clarke has earned life.

“And your own life?”

Well that’s easy, isn’t it? That’s a given.

“I don’t have one without her,”

Wells makes a sound in the back of his throat, the only thing that gives away how frustrated he is by all of this.

“Bellamy, she cares about you just as much as you care about her. She probably looks at it the exact same way. Wake up, okay? Be fair to everyone involved in this shit.”

And then he’s carrying himself away before Bellamy can answer him, back to the place next to Clarke where he takes her and tucks an arm underneath hers, a hand coming up to card through her hair. It does nothing for her nightmare, and Bellamy finds himself wincing from it every couple of minutes.

He remembers holding her like that and soothing her from the haunted dreams. He should be the one by her side now, and he isn’t. And it’s his own damn fault.

Wells doesn’t take the pain away like Bellamy did, and they both know why. Because he isn’t her person. Her person lost all right to take her pain away. He doesn’t get to touch her to make it easier.

No, Bellamy can only add this to the list of reasons why Clarke is in pain because of him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Walking eyes, and tearful skies are home again,'  
> \- I'd Let You Win, PORTS


	34. I'm waiting for you

The eight of them head out when dusk begins to settle in properly. The girls are nervous, fallen quiet and anxious in the time it takes Bellamy to kick the fire down and for the rest of them to take their weapons back into their hands.

Clarke tries to tell them that they’ll be safe in the middle of them. Roan is strangely assuring too. She remembers the first time she met him, how he was friendly before they were friends, comfortable before Clarke could call it comfort. She’s sad that they argued, and she decides to set things right when they’re back on the road, weaving between the same abandoned cars.

Harper and Maya can walk on their own. They weren’t ashamed of having to be carried. The relief and the shock of finding other people, people who can look after them now, was clearly overwhelming. They won’t have recovered from that yet, but they will, and they are steadily. They stay linked together.

Clarke engineers their arrangement so that her and Roan are leading the way, sandwiching the girls between them and the other four. She doesn’t want to have to think about being on uneven ground with him too. Not now that the dust has settled over both the mission and the lead up to it.

She’s adamant that she was not in the wrong about taking Charlotte in. It was the humane thing to do and she’s slightly concerned that Roan has forgotten that. Humanity certainly isn’t one of his priorities.

“So about this suspension,” she starts, not bothering to approach it subtly.

He looks over to her calmly, the small grin on his face that reminds her so much of a wild cat.

“What about it?” Roan asks, his voice knowing, teasing.

“Come on Roan, be reasonable,”

He stays quiet.

“What do you want me to do? Salute you every time you walk into a room?”

Roan considers her with his sly, perhaps sultry under some lights, expression.

“We need order, Clarke,” he sighs, but sounds a lot easier than he did before the hotel. She takes that as a sign to fight back.

“Since when? Order doesn’t exist anymore,”

Just a reminder.

“No apology then?” he tries, smirking.

“You became my friend before you became my leader. I’m not sorry for disagreeing with you or for following my gut,”

“Your friend huh? You told me you didn’t need any more of them,”

“No I told you I don’t need any more knights,”

“So I’ve seen,” Roan muses absently, throwing his head back to the others.

She opens her mouth to challenge that, but he just grins wider and shakes his head to let her know she doesn’t need to.

“I shouldn’t be punishing you for fighting Clarke, just don’t mistake the people you should be fighting. You don’t get to steamroll past me when you make decisions like that. We have a way of doing things because of incidents like Charlotte in the past. I know it’s ugly, and it’s worse with the kids, but…”

“Has to be done,” she finishes, grimacing but understanding all the same.

“It’s not just physically challenging being on this team. It never is in war. You’ve got to be strong up here,” he says, pointing to his temple, “as well. We make the hard decisions so that no one else has to. What you did with her, at the end, that was the strong thing to do.”

“Why did you make me feel like shit after it then?”

Roan shrugs.

“I didn’t think it’d be easy having another one of your lot around here. You’ve all given me trouble in some way or another, and I was bracing myself for what you’d be like,”

Clarke doesn’t know which bit to ask about first.

“And?”

“And you’re a nightmare. But I think I kinda want to marry you,”

She barks a laugh and looks over at him, takes glee in how he’s biting down a smile, trying to stay gloomy.

“I thought you hated me,” she admits.

“Nah,”

He takes her hand as he guides her over a knocked over motorcycle. She’d always wanted to drive one of these as a kid and she went through an infatuation with girls who could while she was in high school.

“How did Raven piss you off?”

“She wouldn’t stop fucking picking at the rover: kicking wheels, popping the bonnet whenever we stopped for five seconds,”

“That’s Raven,” she grins.

“Well I know that now,”

“Bellamy and Wells were talking earlier, you know,” he offers after some time, sounding too nonchalant for that to be natural. He must be forcing this, which means they spoke, and it meant something, whatever they spoke about.

“And they both came out without a broken nose?”

“Sure did,”

He sounds awfully proud.

“I take it you were eavesdropping?”

“Couldn’t help it,” Roan shrugs unapologetically, hiding something behind the lift of his shoulder. “You and your moaning made it impossible to sleep,”

“Sorry,”

“We all get ‘em,”

He waves a hand.

Clarke is a little scared to ask what Bellamy and Wells discussed.

“I’m not trying to become your Dr. Phil. Frankly I don’t care half as much as a lot of you do, but the way he acted when we ran from those walkers,” he says in a hushed voice. “I’ve never seen anything like it before Griffin. When we saw Wells and Miller come out with the girls, and you weren’t there… it was like nothing else existed in the world.”

“That was just what we were,” Clarke tries to reason, but the words hit her hard and she’ll probably start overthinking this the second she’s on her own and in the clear.

“You remember much from the day we found you guys?”

She thinks back to all those years and years ago. The sun has properly set now; they’re a few hours from where they left the rover and Roan has a map in hand but he’s not really using it. They can all remember which way they’ve got to go.

“No,” she answers him, curious as to where this is going. She hasn’t been given much from that day. “Things start to go fuzzy by the time I got to the staircase. I don’t remember hitting my head,”

“Me and Miller were the first ones to see you and him. Wells found Raven just outside and he got pretty distracted with her, so we told him we’d take the others. He didn’t realize you were in that broom closet. He definitely didn’t know you were dying. So we broke the door down, and Bellamy had his arms wrapped around you and he was swinging you around, shouting like hell for you to wake up, and I’ve never seen a man so broken. We- uh- we were telling him to leave you behind. There was enough of your blood over you, him, the floor, for us to make that decision. We thought you were dead then and we needed to get the people out who were actually alive,”

He sounds cautious about that part, but Clarke doesn’t bear any resentment towards them for doing that. It was just one of those hard decisions that he’s been talking about. She lets him carry on, choking down the emotion as she tries her best to picture any of this in her mind.

“He wouldn’t let you go. He was unreachable. He was shouting at us to go and find his sister, practically incoherent, but he made it pretty clear that if we weren’t taking you, then he was staying exactly where he was in that closet. We were gonna pick him up, just carry him down the stairs if we had to, but then Raven must have told Wells where you were because he came in and we knew he wouldn’t leave you either. We didn’t know you were the Clarke that he’d been talking about all this time. You and Raven are the whole reason he joined Ark, by the way. He wanted the best shot at finding you. Anyway, the point is, the way Bellamy’s face just blanked out back there, thinking you were trapped in that hotel. He cares just as much as he did five months ago,”

“That…”

“What?” Roan prompts when Clarke’s voice gives out on her and she has to clear her throat multiple times until it’s steady again.

“That doesn’t explain why he left me,”

“Doesn’t it?”

“It really doesn’t,” she tries to point out.

“People do weird things for love,”

“He doesn’t love me,” is something Clarke needs him to understand. She needs everyone to understand that. They won’t move past anything until they accept it.

Roan sighs.

“If you two don’t have a conversation about this, a real, honest conversation, then I’m going to lock you in the same room for as long as it takes. Just because I’m taking back your suspension does not mean I make a habit of giving empty threats,”

But she knows they need to talk too. Nothing is adding up anymore, and it’s becoming too confusing for her to just push down.

“Can we talk about you now?”

“Why me?”

“Because we’re always talking about me. I’m boring myself. What’s your story?”

He smirks crookedly again, turning to face her fully for a moment.

“I don’t need you trying to become my Dr. Phil either,” he says as a reminder.

“It’s called getting to know someone. You wanted to try it the day we met,”

“Only because I thought you’d put out,” he mumbles. Clarke rolls her eyes and checks his shoulder with hers. She wouldn’t believe that for a second. Wait, no, actually she would. But just for a second.

“Try again,”

“This how you wore Murphy down?”

She shrugs her shoulders, then glances briefly back to the four of them out of habit, just to make sure everyone is still together. There he is, talking to Wells in that casual, distant way that he’s made his own habit of doing. Not with her though.

In truth, she doesn’t know how she wore him down. How she earned his respect to the level that she has, but she respects him just as much. It just feels natural now, like blood. Like how family should.

“Maybe. It’s only fair though. You know so much about me,”

“Then I’ll spare you the sob story and give you the cliff-notes. It’s not pretty Clarke,”

“Okay,”

“My sister got pregnant when she was young. She was fifteen when she had the baby, fifteen when she died during childbirth, and I was twenty-nine, so I took the kid in. She was my blood. Our mother was traditional, old money, we were the talk of the town and she hated us because of it. She despised my baby, but she was mine, you know? I took her in as my own, and it was shitty giving up the marines, right? Because I’d been part of that life for a decade by then, and I was passionate about it. I just loved her more.

She wasn’t bitten, but there are ways to catch the infection that no one understands. I don’t have to tell you that. You asked me what gave me the right to decide who lives and dies, truth is, no one should have that right. It’s just something I’ve known for too long, and the one time I couldn’t choose, I lost my kid,”

“Roan,”

“I don’t need your pity,”

“I know,”

Clarke thinks for a moment as they pad the soles of their boots against concrete.

“So Charlotte?”

“Was a bit of a flesh wound, yeah,”

“You could have told me that,” she nudges his shoulder, feeling too useless for the weight of their words. “For what it’s worth, I think your sister would be proud of you. You’ve saved so many lives,”

“Alright, alright,” Roan grimaces, waving a hand to the ground to put a stop to it.

So she does stop it. He lost his daughter. Clarke doesn’t know what to do with the guilt that grows when she thinks back to how he seemed like he had no humanity. Maybe she’s just starting to forget what humanity is now, judging people with too few legs to stand on.

 

…

 

They get to the rover a few hours later, left untouched and unharmed, and they fold into it. Clarke drives through the night with Miller at her side, navigating without much vigor, monotonous and routine, too focused on crossing certain roads out to have an actual conversation.

Of course, Harper and Maya take the benches so that they can get some more rest. They claim not to need it, but they are out like lights before the engine starts up properly and they stay that way for hours.

The boys are scattered across the floor, completing errands like cleaning boots, sorting food, changing. Clarke drives into a dozen walkers in the middle of the night and she’s glad the girls aren’t awake to witness it.

The windshield is barred along with the windows. The walls are a shield, moving with enough speed to have integrity. She ploughs through the center of the group, the tires rolling over what feels like a speed bump and another, and a body goes flying over the roof of the shell.

“Shit,” she hears from inside the other compartment and can’t tell if it’s because she’s accelerating recklessly or because of the curves she’s had to shape the rover around.

The stragglers chase after them for a while, and when they hit a dead end, she has to reverse back over a few. One catches a bar on the window, clings on to it even as she speeds up further.

Miller tells Clarke to wind her window down, prepping Roan’s pistol in his hand as he points it towards her head.

“Miller!” Wells shouts through, probably seeing the direction of the barrel of the gun and thinking the worst. They’ll laugh about this later.

Right now though, Clarke follows the order and leans forward to press her head into the steering wheel, barely catching sight of the road ahead as Miller pulls the trigger and hits the gap between the alloyed poles.

She doesn’t hesitate to wind the window back up, and breathes a laugh once Miller’s put the gun down again.

It’s an hour later, when they’re sure they’re out of the woods and they’re back on to a road that they know they can get through, Miller asks:

“Okay, be honest, scale of one to ten. Did you think I was going to shoot you?”

“By accident?”

He shrugs, smirking mildly.

“Six,” she decides once her lips have pursed to the side and she’s genuinely considered it.

“Cool,”

He seems content with that, and they fall back into that repetitive push and shove, command and proceed, and Roan takes over from her at sunset, puts a hand on her shoulder on the way around the rover, calls her Angel when he tells her she needs to go the other way around to stay safe.

She piles in next to Wells, him at Maya’s feet, her shoulder pressed against the back doors. Murphy is down the other end, laid down between the two girls, and Bellamy is cross-legged opposite the two of them. There’s not room for them all to lie down, but Wells tells her to put her boots on his lap and to put her head in the corner of the rover. It’s uncomfortable. Still, her jacket is a mediocre cushion, her bow is something easy to cling on to, and she’s tired.

She falls asleep, wakes up a couple hours later to Miller trying to climb subtly over her head and Bellamy waving an arm to stop the former’s boot from kicking her in the face. Sitting up at this point is probably the wrong decision; Clarke gets a knee to the cheek and Bellamy’s palm hits her square in the forehead.

He snaps his arm away when he sees she’s awake, immediately shoves his face to the floor out of guilt… or embarrassment… or something. And Miller apologizes flippantly before he kicks Murphy’s legs out the way and makes the both of them sit up with their heads resting on the benches.

It’s not a luxury. Wells has moved to the front. They’ll have to keep someone up there in the passenger seat just to make sure they don’t suffocate from being all on top of one another. She doesn’t really think about where she is, which way up her head is, she’s just tired.

With dreams like this, the more sleep she gets, the more tired it makes her. So Clarke passes out again and the next sleep just kind of changes.

It’s not breathless. Not deadly. She doesn’t feel fear here, not in this one. She feels sanctity in a way she hasn’t had in an awful long time and it is warm and just peaceful.

She wakes up when the sun has already set, feels that same warmth pressed to her back, and spins her head briefly to see Bellamy facing the other way. Back to back, heads leant heavily on each other’s, the sole of her boot flat against his calf.

She knows the effect he had on her nightmares before, is surprised to see that that hasn’t changed, and stills again when she hears his quietened voice radiating softly through the rover.

They’re awake. She’s facing the doors so she can’t actually see anything of them, and she shouldn’t let him be this close, but there is literally no other way to sit.

If he doesn’t know she’s awake, then…

“No I was never in any warzones,”

“You hold yourself like a soldier,” Harper hums casually, soft so as not to wake Clarke, she guesses. “You all do. What did you do before that?”

“Whatever I could. Janitor, bartender, electrician,”

Electrician? She wants to ask about that. In all of those conversations, that’s something she never got.

“Worst job?”

“Waiting probably. Anything where you were invisible,”

“Why did you keep having to switch?”

“I didn’t. They were usually at the same time,”

“That’s impressive,” Harper decides, admiration in her voice. Clarke feels something squeeze in her chest and she refuses to call it jealousy. He’s guarded, always guarded, but he’s more than guarded around Clarke and this conversation is friendly in a way that they can’t be anymore.

Bellamy’s shoulder shrugs against the back of hers, and that tightening warms when she remembers it is her he’s pressed to, it is her foot on his leg… her heart in pieces in his fist.

“People make out like that’s something astounding. Hard work isn’t abnormal. It’s something I did because I had to,” he mumbles, passively.

Clarke starts running her finger over one of the ridges of the doors, picking dust from the dirty floor. Her spine, the individual vertebrae sliding next to his, fitting almost perfectly. Does he even know they’re touching?

He’s talking humbly enough, quietly enough, that he thinks she’s still asleep. There’s no rush to wake up. They’ve done their mission; this is a home stretch. They’ve got hours to wait and drive and direct and sleep.

Bellamy hasn’t mentioned writing.

“So did you actually do anything for fun?”

“Sure,” is all he gives about that. “I’m not a robot.”

Harper hums softly, analyzing. There’s silence for a while and Bellamy’s breathing slowly starts to even out and it relaxes Clarke too, forces her to fall into time with it. There’s some muttering coming from the front seat, still Wells and Roan actually doing something productive or responsible. Clarke would guess Miller is asleep; he’s breathing a little too loudly for the rest of the rover.

And she’s worried Bellamy has fallen asleep, overthinking that detail until Maya breaks the quiet and asks him, must be only him, another question.

She smirks with her eyes closed, plays it off as a twitch or a fidget. Her leg moves a little higher, knee bends a little more, and rests in the corner of his knee. His calf folds up some more over her shin. Her boot is too big for this, but he must think she needs more shelter.

“She’s stopped,” Maya says, so quietly that it takes Clarke a minute longer to figure out what she’s actually said.

Bellamy breathes in deeply and holds it; tentative.

“Leave her be,” Murphy’s voice is muffled as it springs from the floor and then there’s the sound of him rolling, adjusting to get comfortable, trying to sleep.

“Ignore him,” Wells calls in, assuring Maya and Clarke hopes he takes away the coldness Murphy emits. There’s just a lack of a filter, and sometimes that’s a good thing, others… not so much.

“Griffin huh?” Maya whispers, clearly taken aback but still curious. “That’s cool.”

Maybe she’s too awkward to say much else. Wells snorts from the front seat.

“She always dream like that?” Harper asks next.

Bellamy shuffles uncomfortably again, but his leg comes up some more to hold hers. The question is clearly directed to him, with the intimacy it carries, but he starts stuttering pretty much immediately.

“I don’t- I, she could- we don’t…” he sounds like he has no idea how to answer it, taken aback, reading into it. She asked it like he should know more than anyone else.

“You don’t..?” Harper is smiling, not letting him get out of it easy. Clarke pities him.

“We’re not like that,” Bellamy decides after a moment of working it out in his own head. This is more somber but it’s final.

“Cool it Romeo. You’ve been travelling all together for a week,”

Clarke can actually feel the heat radiating from his neck, can see the cherry red of it even if she’s stuck looking at the backs of her eyelids.

She doesn’t even hear Murphy scoff at this. He wasn’t kidding about the ‘dead to me’ part. That’s something that makes this easier, she guesses. It doesn’t feel easier.

“Wait you two aren’t…” Maya perks up, confused.

Wells chooses to help out, for the sake of everyone’s personal awkwardness.

“Clarke’s been through a lot,” he says softly.

“We’ve all been through a lot,” Harper sounds not unkind, but skeptical. Clarke doesn’t find insult in it, because it’s something she’s been trying to let everyone know. She isn’t the only one who’s had to deal with shit.

“More,” Bellamy gruffs out, his shoulders tense against hers.

“Leave her be,” Murphy snaps, with even less patience and more incoherence.

There’s quiet across the floor of the rover. Clarke thinks that the rest of them have just moved on from talking about her, that they’ve chosen instead to occupy themselves with more valuable things, like sleeping.

No. They were just waiting for Murphy to fall asleep apparently.

“So what’s her deal?” Harper asks.

“Her deal?” Bellamy bites back, tired and anxious.

“She does it too,”

“Does what?”

“Holds herself like a soldier,”

He doesn’t answer her, and Clarke’s eyes blink open. She doesn’t want to wriggle away from him. She doesn’t exactly want to stay either, but this would be an awkward moment to make it known she’s awake and it’s not like there’s anywhere else to go.

“She’s beautiful,” Harper hums, distracted but earnest at the same time and Clarke feels her cheeks warm up against the cold shadow of the rover.

Bellamy doesn’t say anything to that either.

Wells does, his voice lightly drifting across the ceiling.

“What makes you say that?” he asks with a smile in his words.

“You forget that people can still be beautiful,”

Clarke wants to turn around, let her know that she’s only saying that because the majority of ‘people’ she’s been hanging around with lately have been dead.

Bellamy’s shoulders are still clenched, and he feels like he’s hurting.

“People like to find beauty in pain,” he says, making Clarke’s spine shiver with his quietened voice, barely loud enough to reach the others. His whisper is damaging. “Especially now that we are losing everything that isn’t pain. Make her laugh. You won’t ever forget it again,”

His words are a command, in that same tone that leaves little room for argument.

And her heart can’t help it, her mind can’t name it, her eyes can’t take it.

She squints as tightly as she can, as her chest beats for the eight of them. Her cheek is resting on top of her flattened and scarred palm, and dead skin grazes her jawline. How can he just say things like that?

With so much ease and none of it at the same time. Things like that as though they’re the only things he knows to be true, to be gospel, holding with them so much integrity while he’s still acting like a shell, like something without a spine.

How can he say something like that, knowing she can’t hear, when it pains him more than it does anyone else?

Clarke doesn’t know how to read exactly into it. Is he calling her beautiful? Is he saying she’s in too much pain to be beautiful, or is he saying that when she’s happy, it’s exceptional? Would he ever give her that much again?

He called her beautiful before she died, made her feel beautiful even when she was at her worst.

 _He_ was beautiful. He _is_ beautiful. But that might be her trying to find beauty in pain, like he said people tend to do. Is she people now?

No. He is beautiful. Everything about him that she craved before they were found, he’s still got. Still sharp, still impossibly quick to understand the plans she makes, still thinking on his feet with strategy and tactics, and at the same time, he cares.

He cared about Charlotte, about the survivors, even Miller sleeping on the benches, he cares in the ways people forget to care. She loved him for that. Those subtleties, where he doesn’t even realize he’s doing his caring. Telling stories, giving distraction, carrying Harper without hesitation. She loved him.

Bellamy, with his spine lined up to hers, so that if someone were to send a spear through his heart, it’d miss hers, hasn’t changed in the way they say he has. The only thing different is he doesn’t have Clarke anymore, and so he doesn’t act the way he did when she was with him.

He’s lost something about him, but that doesn’t make him distinctly worse. He’s not evil. Far from evil. He just doesn’t radiate good in the way Wells does. It’s beneath the cracks in his skin and the fissures in his words.

Clarke never minded reading between the lines. He drew her to him for that. There’s just one canyon too big for her to hold. It doesn’t make the walls there, doesn’t make the rock any different. Perhaps falling into that canyon is too dangerous. Perhaps she should take the bridge being offered by his passivity, the safer, more fluid route.

That’s what people do when they cross a canyon.

But he’s calling her beautiful.

So simply, so nonchalant, he’s making out like Clarke has a forever kind of beautiful.

She doesn’t know how to pretend to be asleep for that.

“What is she then? Your sister?” Harper asks, still sounding confused. Clarke hears Roan snort from the driver’s seat. Bellamy chokes on something and has to cough a couple of times to get rid of it. He sits himself up and leaves Clarke’s back feeling bare and cold and vulnerable again. His eyes are on her and she has to try harder to make it look like she’s not awake, eyes as relaxed as they can be. She hopes the flush in her cheeks can be explained by his warmth. Her breathing becomes heavier as he watches her, checking to see if the surprise stopped her from sleeping, but she must sell it because Bellamy relents and reclaims his space in the puzzle, slotted next to her.

“No,” he says tersely. “I only have one sister.”

“But you’re not dating?”

“No,”

“And you don’t want to date?”

“It’s not as simple as that,”

“Jesus, Harper, go easy,” Maya sighs and the sounds of her shuffling let Clarke know she’s trying to get comfortable, trying to end this conversation.

“I’m just interested,”

“No kidding,”

There’s a smile in the brunette’s voice that makes Clarke’s heart tighten a little again, a rush of something she doesn’t want to have to call jealousy. She wonders if Bellamy has always had this effect on the girls he meets that are around his age. It’s not like Roan or Miller or Wells aren’t good looking. She can’t even put Murphy and attraction into the same sentence.

But Bellamy is the definition of tall, dark and handsome. He looks like a hero. So it’s no wonder that Harper, with her slightly dreaded hair and her easy smile, the kind of pretty that is effortless, would take interest in him.

If Bellamy picks up on that, he ignores it. The interrogation fades away from there and the girls must have fallen asleep again. Clarke waits until he’s fallen asleep too before she extracts herself, and she shouts over to Wells that she wants to sit up front.

She makes out that it’s because she wants something to do otherwise he won’t let her. Unless he thinks he’s doing something for someone else, he won’t do it. But he needs a break.

Murphy takes over driving and they spend the hours, when she’s not trying to figure out how to orientate the map, bickering about anything either of them can think off. Days pass and Clarke decides living with eight people in one stretched car is too much.

Harper and Maya try to offer up the benches every so often, but it’s a futile attempt. When no one is sleeping, they’ll gather to talk across the space, but the floor is never not occupied by at least someone.

Sharing space with Bellamy becomes easier. Every time Clarke starts to spiral into a bit of an episode about the things that have happened between them, he retracts into himself, almost like he can read her mind about it all, and he takes himself out of the equation like he’s so used to doing. He makes it so that she can ignore him, she can become as petty as Murphy and pretend he doesn’t even exist.

Other times, Clarke can be more mature: she can be civil and thank him when he gives her a water refill after she’s procrastinated doing it for too long. She can let go of the sole of his boot pressed to hers when they’re sat opposite each other on the chairs.

She loses count of the days it’s taken them to do the mission. That’s Roan’s job, to keep track.

Miller announces the moment they arrive back into Vancouver, in the middle of Wells telling Harper and Maya about Peter, and some of the other kids back at base. He celebrates by doing a donut, talking flippantly, his actions completely outweighing his words, and Roan cuffs him across the back of the head in retribution.

Clarke is glad she can’t see out of the rover properly, because she’s worried about recognizing some of the roads out here. Not that those last few days will ever be clear or stark, but she never wants to see that damn hospital again, not even in the corner of her eye.

And then it’s night and the dark takes over and Miller is racing towards a solid wall, thick and reinforced with netting and fencing and a gap to be shot at from. Clarke is sat on the edge, closest to the door, opposite Maya with a hand braced on her knee because she seems uneasy about heading straight for a solid wall.

Which is something that anyone sane would be.

The gate opens at the last minute. Nothing external stops them from moving forward and the rover comes to a stop yards from the main building. Wells is at the door, throwing them both open in one motion, and he’s jumping to the enclosed ground to help everyone else get out.

Clarke holds Maya’s arm as they clamber down, her pack strapped across both shoulders, and Raven is practically giddy with the way she’s running from the lever at the gates, her smile boundless and unashamed. A ‘fuck you, let me be happy,’ kind of smile.

Clarke’s knees droop a little and she drops the bag to the ground, making sure Maya is steady to stand on her own once she’s directed them to the side of the rover. Murphy gets out too, walks to meet Clarke, probably so that Raven doesn’t have to choose who to jump on first.

She grabs them both around the neck, elbows hooking roughly, Clarke’s shoulder clashing with his as they’re pulled inwards.

“You knew we’d be back,” Murphy sounds reluctant, rolling his eyes, not entertained by her hug.

“I know I knew,” Raven shrugs. “So what?”

Clarke snickers into her shoulder, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other hanging limp at her own side awkwardly.

“You gonna let us breathe any time soon?”

“Wasn’t planning on it,”

“Of course you weren’t,”

“Wells is round the other side,” Clarke hums, just in case she’s wondering, before she breathes heavily to get the wisps of Raven’s ponytail out of her nose.

“You’re all safe?”

“And sound,”

She seems content enough with that, and Raven pulls away, leaving a palm slack on both of their arms, almost like a shield for the three of them, her teeth pearls along a bed of shadow.

“Reyes!” Roan calls from the entrance to the main building, Wells and Miller in tow, along with the two girls. “Back to your post.”

Raven rolls her eyes and tuts her teeth, clearly ignoring Roan in favor of catching Wells’ eye, who seems to have stopped still in his tracks at the sight of her. The breath has been knocked from his chest, visible to Clarke from yards and yards away, and he holds a hand up in acknowledgement. A wave with a smile that seems too sad for what this should be.

Maybe he’s too far for Clarke to properly read into that.

He’ll be going to give the girls a tour of the place, get them sorted with rooms and spare clothes and warm food. Not all six of them need to help with that, not without getting in the way.

Wells hastens to catch up with others, shaking his head out, tripping over his feet on the way through the door and Raven snorts as she catches it.

“How was it?” she turns to ask the two of them.

The engine of the rover starts up, rattling Clarke, and she gets a glimpse of Bellamy in the driving seat before he starts steering away from the three of them. It’s the pull of her gut that makes Clarke stumble a few steps toward the back of the rough-and-tumble vehicle.

They’ve been together, literally physically together, for over a week, nearly two. The sinking realization that he’s just going to be gone again after this hits her like a truck.

He’s probably only going to park up, to get the rover out of the way and to turn it around for when it needs to be taken out again, but he’s still leaving. But it’s Bellamy driving away, leaving again.

And to do anything about that, to try and stop him, would be pointless. So Clarke stops herself from doing whatever her body was planning on doing, and stills in her tracks, mouth open and heart racing and hand fisted.

He turns the sharp corner, not angrily or jolted, and then he’s thin air, scattered, sound spilling while she can’t see him, like it always is with him anymore.

“Eventful,” Murphy gives, his voice drifting in the opposite direction from where he’d be expected to go.

They’re both stood behind Clarke as she watches the space that Bellamy just vacated, but she turns on her heels to see them both starting to walk towards the wall. There’s no one else out here, so Raven must be on her own during this hour of watch.

She really wants a shower and needs one even more than that. She’s going to have to ease back into being alone though, and chases after her friends.

Bumping into Raven’s shoulder, hers and Murphy’s packs abandoned where they first ditched them, they head over. Clarke slumps down to sit facing the building, head leaning against the wall, as Raven adjusts her gun to aim through the gap in the wall as it would have been before they arrived, and Murphy joins Clarke’s side.

She takes the time to relish in the fresh air, the lack of rush and panic associated with being outside. It’s hard to remember what it is like to be safe once you’re back out there.

“Spill it then,” Raven says, kicking at Clarke’s shins. The night is warm enough to shed her jacket, so she does and instantly feels better for it. There’s a heaviness to the air; a humidity.

“We found a kid,” she gives, trying to think of any other ‘event’ that Murphy would be referring to. “A little girl in a gas station but I didn’t make sure to check if she was safe and we ended up having to shoot her,”

“Jesus Christ,”

“I know,”

“You had to watch her turn?”

“No. We found the bite before. She was still human,”

“Barely,” Murphy grunts, kicking both legs out and tilting his head up to the sky. “Roan went mental.”

“Mental is an overstatement,”

“Threatened to suspend her,”

“He didn’t?” Raven shoots her head to see the two of them.

“She went in on him,” he grins, nudging Clarke’s arm with his elbow, proud in a sketchy way. “Tore the whole ‘family’ ideology to shreds.”

She tries not to feel guilty about that now, knowing why Roan might be clinging to that hope of a community.

“And then he let it go when he realized how badass she actually is,”

“What did you do?” Raven smirks.

“Apparently I can still shoot,” Clarke shrugs back. “Roan said he wants to marry me.”

She barks a laugh into the sight of her gun.

“Kind of,” she corrects herself.

“I missed a lot then. How are those girls? I thought there were meant to be three,”

“There were three when they made the call for help but one of them got bitten. They had to lock her in the bathroom, I think they stuck a chair leg through her head. The fact that any of them made it at all is insane considering how many walkers were outside that hotel,”

“The small one looked terrified,”

“She is,”

“How’ve you been?” Murphy turns his head casually, not in any sort of rush. A silhouette walks across the front of the building and Clarke can’t tear her eyes away from it as it walks towards the floodlights at the entrance. Bellamy rushes to duck his head through and she wonders if sitting in a spotlight, as her and Murphy and Raven are doing now, is enough for him to see them too.

Either way, he’s pacing inside, his ruffled and scraggly hair leading the way.

“Fine. Luckily, Monty is the coding genius here so we’ve been doing a lot of arguing about stuff neither of you two will ever understand,”

“And here we were thinking she’d missed us,” Murphy prods Clarke’s forearm.

“Try not to cry too much Murph. We’re working on something pretty cool actually,”

She waits until they’ve both looked up to her to carry on, as though making them work for more.

“We’re trying to boost the signal of the radio calls we’re getting. There’s an engineer in research who’s pretty into this shit too and we started thinking about places like this all over the world. It’s not like we’re gonna be the only ones. If we can get signals internationally…”

“Satellites are still running?”

“For now, yeah,”

“Where you shooting for?”

“Russia’s the obvious possibility. Asian countries, islands like Japan. There’s probably no hope for China.”

“And Europe?”

“We’ll see,”

There’s quiet and peace for a moment, just as all of that actually sinks in.

“You ever thought about-” but Clarke cuts off and it takes Murphy shoving her to make her carry on. “Well, there’s like none of us left. It makes you wonder if the species is even gonna be able to carry on when we’re all this whole continent has.”

“Jasper has a theory,”

They never talk like this, so explicitly about what the apocalypse actually means for the future, or the attempts that might be made to right the wrongs of nature. It’s exciting but terrifying at the same time.

“He thinks that there’s got to be something in our blood,”

“Like an immunity gene?”

“Maybe,”

“We honestly don’t know shit about any of this,” Murphy sighs, his head thunking harshly against the wall. If Clarke were to do that, she’d probably black out. “What if this is just a correction? Like nature’s way of getting rid of us?”

“Then nature isn’t the person we thought she’d be,” Raven tuts her teeth, refusing to buy into his pessimism.

“Been busy?” he asks, nodding outside of the walls to the blank and looming night. Clarke rubs at her neck to wipe away the layer of sweat starting to gather.

“A couple. I don’t think they know we’re inside. There’d be more if they did,”

She’s right. It’s not like they ever bother to give up without a fight. They hunt until they die or until they’ve forgotten about the object of their hunt. Clarke takes an arrow from behind her back and spins it in her hand.

“Come on then,” Raven pulls an eye away from her gun, looking down to Clarke with a knowing glint to her smile. “When are we comparing Blakes?”

“Is that a thing we do now?”

“I figured it’d happen sooner or later,”

“Let’s just leave it to tomorrow,” Clarke grimaces, looking to the place where Bellamy’s silhouette tumbled through. She needs a night to herself to figure everything out, order her thoughts because she’s sure Raven is going to have a bucket load of things to say, so she’s gonna need to know what she thinks before she can argue with someone else about it.

“How long are you working for?”

“Couple hours more; you think you can stay awake until then?”

“We’ve been sleeping for a week,” Murphy lets her know.

“You guys made that shit out to be a lot harder than it actually was,” Clarke says, thinking back to how much of the mission was literally just travelling. And the hotel itself, that was just a day of being on autopilot.

He snorts back.

“Says the queen of all things drama,”

“Remember how I made it nearly two weeks without hitting you in the face?” she turns to him, eyebrow raised, arrowhead stilled in her fist. “Let’s not ruin that now,”

His overgrowing beard morphs in the spotlight.

“Where’s the fun in that?”

Raven joins in on the bickering pretty soon in, falling into the natural rhythm of how they’ve always been, and even though Clarke is gross and sweaty and ready for some alone time, the time spent is easy and familiar.

Niylah comes out after a while, greets them with warmth that Clarke doesn’t think she’s quite earned yet, then tells the both of them to get lost because apparently they smell worse than Monroe’s ‘chicken’ stew.

The three of them head up to Ark and Clarke tries to drown herself in the shower before she can start to feel clean again. She steps out and relishes in the freshness that freezing cold water brings with it, changes hurriedly into some clean clothes, then escapes to her shared room and has to take a moment to remember the passcode to the door.

Raven is in her bed when she flicks the light off and ditches her towel and her dirty clothes on top of her sheath of arrows. She can sort it later.

There’s no hesitation in Clarke’s decision about which bed to take, because Raven has had this room to herself for at least ten days and if she wants more space than that then she won’t be shy about voicing that.

She remains thoughtfully quiet as Clarke climbs up the shuddering, almost spineless, ladder, and she lands gracelessly on the pillow next to her friend’s head, both of them watching the ceiling inches from their faces.

Clarke’s arms are folded across her chest, Raven’s twitching by her sides and grazing Clarke’s hips. She takes a step, not a leap or a jump, just a step and leans her head to the side. Raven meets her, just as naturally, their heads tepeed and leant so that there’s no pressure from anywhere.

“Missed you Griff,”

“Missed you too, Rae,”

“Don’t kick me in your sleep or you’ll be on the floor,”

Clarke grins into the dark and closes her eyes, scooting away from the edge of the bed just in case.

 

…

 

Raven’s watch starts vibrating against Clarke’s waist hours later, waking them both up reluctantly without the ease of daylight that Clarke had been getting used to. Her eyes flutter open with the heaviness of ill-sleep, and her throat feels scratchy when she yawns, but at least she managed to stay on the bed. That counts for something.

They jump down and move around each other in preparation for the day to come. It’s not early morning, since they stayed up until the moon began to set, but it’s soon enough to make it to breakfast.

A small part of her has missed the routine of this, of knowing where she should be at certain parts of the day. Clarke used to believe that she thrives in order. Some part of her might still do just that.

Not enough.

They knock on Wells and Murphy’s door as they walk past it but don’t wait around for them to come out, trusting that they’ll follow the sound alone, too caught up in their own conversation.

Once the boys have caught up, they don’t bother to split the group of four into smaller segments. There’s no walking along in pairs or taking sides, there’s just four friends barreling obnoxiously through a corridor which means they’ve left no room for anyone coming in the opposite direction.

Wells quizzes Raven on what might have gone down between the commanders, not that she’d actually know, and he asks if any improvements have been made to the algae with way too much hope in his voice. She fills them in on the insignificant details, like how a couple of the kids got into trouble when they tried to sneak into Ark wing, which is amusing enough as it is.

They walk into the mess hall, ignore the traditional eyes that follow them, and Clarke chooses instead to tow Wells over to a bench at the corner of the room that holds Jasper, Monty, Harper and Maya in a neat huddle.

“Look who it is,” Jasper grins, beams, radiates happiness that Clarke knows has nothing to do with her.

“Cockroach number two,” she smirks back, and asks how the girls are doing, if they slept okay, if they’ve had a chance to test the showers yet.

Both of them seem simply passive. Not tentative, just relaxed. They respond to her with warmth. Apparently Jasper and Monty ran into them when they were being checked over in the med ward and insisted on giving them the rest of the tour since they had ‘nothing else to do’. Clarke doesn’t bother reminding them that their jobs are something enough to do, considering the way Jasper is leaning so closely to the quieter brunette, his eyes glazed over like marble.

Wells tells them that if they need anything, all they have to do is ask, which is of course something that he would say. She rolls her eyes fondly at him and waits until he’s started walking away before she reiterates the sentiment.

Murphy and Raven are slapping at each other’s hands at the serving station, him reaching for the tongs that Monroe has discarded in favor of something else and snapping them teasingly in her face. Clarke half expects him to start pulling on her ponytail next.

They get their rations of food, ones Clarke can’t help but wrinkle her nose at when the portion includes a wriggling, seeping lump of green moss. The four of them make their way over to the Ark table, and she puts her tray down next to Miller’s without really thinking about it or acknowledging Bellamy on his other side.

They’re a team after all. There’s no use in pretending not to be just that.

“Incoming,” Raven warns once they’re all seated, breaking away from her conversation with Wells to gesture pointedly behind Clarke.

She turns in her seat, just in time to see three children bounding over towards the table. There are two boys and one girl, and she remembers that one of them is the kid she met on her first visit to the mess, Benji.

She shoves down the guilt that threatens to rise in her throat at the thought of the girl hidden behind a gas station counter, eyes wide and terrified, hoodie brown and rotten.

“Clarke!” the girl calls, and she tries to recall her name but fails.

“Hi,” she settles for instead, giving them a smile. “How’re you doing?”

“Mom’s got us helping out in the kitchens,” she groans, as though they’ve known each other for years, nodding to the boy on Benji’s other side. “We’re in trouble.”

“Don’t tell me,” Clarke sighs, shaking her head. “I don’t want to be an accessory to the fact.”

All three of their brows scrunch up at the same time.

Wells, on her left, turns too and grins warmly, just his natural response to people.

“She means she can’t afford to be a partner in crime,”

The girl’s cheeks flush when he addresses her and she looks down to her shoes, even stumbles a little into who Clarke guesses is her brother.

“She means she’s a wimp,” Murphy calls, tossing a piece of dry bread roll into his mouth clumsily. Clarke kicks him underneath the table.

“We just wanted to say hi to you guys,” the girl mumbles, still dancing across her feet on the floor now that Wells is paying attention, trying not to smile because she’s nervous.

“It’s good to see you,” Clarke hums and waves back when Benji waves at her, a couple of steps away from the other two.

“You lot should make the most of working in the kitchens,” Wells says conspiratorially, leaning in. “You never know, you might be able to fix the food.”

And that sets them off, running away, content with the greeting, distracted with laughing about what he’s said.

The warmth doesn’t last for too long.

By the time Clarke has spun back around to face the rest of them, there’s a presence that freezes whatever comfort had come to rest over the table and a stone drops into her stomach. Cage Wallace is sat opposite Miller, right beside Raven, eating with a forged nonchalance.

She wants to ask him when he officially joined Ark, to put him on the spot for entering a place where he is not welcome. Yet Clarke bites her tongue and chews on the food in her mouth.

He manages to ignore her for all of five minutes. She can hear Bellamy’s thoughts, even with Miller as a blockade, and his reluctance to put up with this smarmy man is evident from the tightening of his shoulders, visible from where she’s sat every time she sneaks a glance.

“Your mom’s expecting you,” Cage says as a form of welcome, voice still with that layer of greed laced into it. “She wants you to go to our floor.”

“ _Your_ floor?” Clarke meets his gaze, feeling a lot stronger than she felt before she left.

“The Commanders’,”

She doesn’t growl about the fact that he doesn’t deserve to live with the commanders, because he’s not one. He’s a drifter in this place and what’s worse is he knows that deep down, and he’s lying about being more than that. He wants attention, in whatever form that might come.

“Fine,”

He grins at her, more of a hungry sort of snarl, looking like he’s accepting a challenge that she hasn’t even proposed.

Bellamy doesn’t say anything, but she can tell it’s because he’s physically trying not to.

They eat breakfast faster than they would do normally, and Clarke is one of the first ones to get up and walk away from that table. The others don’t question her on when she’ll be back; she’s on recovery for today so it’s not like she’s needed.

She’ll go and visit Abby, cross it off her to-do-list like she knows she needs to. Raven will chase her down eventually and ask her what it was like spending so much time around Bellamy, but his words are still lingering on her shoulders, alternating between pushing them down and lifting them up. His back is still imprinted upon hers, his breath when they fought, his smirk and his heavy blink, and the conversation between him and Wells that she has yet to learn about.

Soon enough, without even enough time to round the corner on the way to the stairwell, someone is calling her name from behind her and is jogging to catch up. She turns around, knowing full well who it is before she is forced to look upon his pathetic boyband hairstyle or his pressed lips.

“Clarke,” Cage says, as though it’s a term of endearment. “You’ll need me to get in.”

She doesn’t need a man who doesn’t even understand the meaning of the word ‘no’ for anything. She’d rather just sit on the top floor and wait outside the locked door for hours instead of giving in to Cage’s assertion.

But in a much more practical sense, he’s right.

Clarke doesn’t answer him. She walks up the stairs, flight after flight, with him trailing one or two steps behind, and she brushes away the attempts he makes to engage her in conversation. He asks her how the ‘trip’ was, as though it was nothing. She wouldn’t dream of mentioning Charlotte or the hotel to him, especially not just to prove to him that he’s doing nothing for this place.

Instead, Clarke bites her tongue and focuses on keeping her breath steady as they climb up in tandem.

He punches in a code for a door that looks just the same as all the others, and Clarke doesn’t know what she expected from this floor, but it bears no grandeur or majesty. It’s a mirror image of Ark, and she laughs to herself about that all the way to the door that Cage tells her leads to her mother’s room.

Granted, the rooms here are a lot more spaced out, which probably means they’re bigger and Clarke would guess they each hold their own bathrooms.

He lingers when Clarke draws to a stop, his head dipping slightly, his hands in the pockets of his pants. It reminds her of a boy trying to walk a girl up the road to her driveway, saying goodnight after a date, and that’s just as laughable.

It’s almost as though he’s expecting a thank you or waiting for her to ask when she’ll see him again.

Time stretches for an embarrassingly long amount of time and Cage’s smile slowly fades as it sinks in that Clarke isn’t going to so much as try to pretend to be charmed. He holds on to her forearm when he says goodbye, leans in much too close, and then strides away with confidence in dangerous surplus.

Clarke shakes away the wafting remains of his presence and braces herself for a conversation with her mother.

Abby had been quite forceful when she asked Clarke if they could talk once she’d come back. There’s always so much left unsaid between them that it could be anything.

“Clarke,” her mother says, smiling tightly in the doorway, relief only just threatening the corners of her face.

Clarke looks her up and down, taking in the greyed scrubs layers over a white base. Scrubs have a way of humbling even the most senior staff in a hospital, but it doesn’t make her feel less threatening.

“Hi,” Clarke says, and shuffles in when Abby gestures for her to do so.

There’s a desk in her room, sheets of paper scattered and under a couple of ballpoint pens. There’s a desk chair, one of the ones without any wheels, and a plain armchair next to it. Clarke doesn’t know which one to take so stays standing while she gets offered a glass of water.

“You get water in your room?”

“Of course,”

If this were any of her friends, they’d make a joke about how water is a pretty necessary thing for a bathroom.

She thanks Abby when she gets handed a mug of slightly cloudy water and pretends to sip at it, awkwardly.

“Have you been to the med ward?”

“Should I?”

The disappointment doesn’t take long to appear on her mother’s face.

“Clarke, I understand you wanting to go off and save the world, but you do need to consider your limits,”

“It’s not saving the world,” she grumbles, dropping into the armchair, giving up with cordiality.

“How is your head?”

“It _was_ doing okay,” Clarke makes a show of rubbing at her temple, to make it clear that the nagging isn’t doing anything to help.

“Okay, okay,” Abby says, taking the desk chair. “I’m not trying to start anything.”

“Then don’t,”

“I won’t. You should be proud,”

“What?” Clarke blinks.

“You saved two lives,”

She doesn’t really know what to say to that. She’s more at home in the silence than she would be if she were to try to come up with something fake. Abby doesn’t give her enough time to be ‘at home’. She never has.

“Oh come on, Clarke. Talk to me,”

“About what?” she has to laugh. This shouldn’t need so much effort. This is a doctor talking to her patient, not a mother talking to her daughter.

“Well you still have feelings, don’t you?”

“Not if I can help it,” she mumbles to her twiddling fingers.

“Give me something,”

Clarke doesn’t know if Abby knows about Bellamy or Octavia. She must know something, surely. She isn’t giving anything away if she does.

“I’m uh… I’m doing better, I swear. I feel more like me out there,”

Abby’s spine relaxes against the straightened chair.

“You’re your father’s daughter,” she says sadly. “Never happy unless you’re moving. How are you sleeping?”

“Not great,” Clarke admits. “But it’s manageable,”

“If you need something for the nights…”

“I’ll ask for help,”

“You don’t though,”

“Because I don’t need it,”

Something catches her eye peeking out from underneath her mother’s mattress and Clarke turns her head to see it.

“Wait are they-”

She stands to her feet, bouncing over to the floor to reach for the clothes she was wearing in those last couple of days. Black hiking trousers, a base t-shirt, and green flannel that has been faded into a brownish color. It takes a couple seconds for the overshirt to flick the switch in her head, and her heart squeezes with that familiar torture that pops up so regularly. It’s his shirt, completely stained by her blood.

“Why have you got these?” she asks, folding her way through the pieces of fabric, fingers clenched.

Abby stays silent and Clarke can’t tear her eyes away from his shirt.

“Mom?”

“I-” her voice cuts as she clears her throat, frozen at the table. “That was all I had of you when you came back. I didn’t know if you were going to wake up. I didn’t want to have nothing.”

“You wanted to keep that day?” Clarke wonders with disbelief. She wouldn’t want to have something covered in fatality.

Again, Abby doesn’t say anything.

She puts the shirt on to her mother’s bed and lifts the other two garments up as she sits at the edge of it. It’s like looking at the relics of another life. She can’t remember what she must have looked like in Bellamy’s clothes, the size of it alone must have been strange.

“It’s not mine,” she says to the shirt, wanting to let her mom know that. It was never hers.

“I know whose it is,” Abby says, voice restrained coolly.

Clarke snaps her head up at that and her mouth opens to say something, eager, for a second, to connect the dots between the two of them in her life. She’d never thought about introducing Bellamy to her mother, considering the fact that Clarke thought she’d seen her die.

“Oh,” is the only sound that makes it past her lips, because that eagerness falls and burns. Bellamy isn’t what he was to her in the time that she got to wear that shirt.

“He’s not giving you any trouble, is he?” she asks, not even with the gall to be careful around the subject. She’s a doctor asking her patient if the symptoms are recurring.

“Why would you say that?”

There’s something crawling, a rat beneath a welcome mat, something brewing under all of this.

And Abby’s about to reply until Clarke folds the pant legs over themselves in an attempt to occupy her hands, to try to ignore that emerald green shirt, and something comes tumbling out of the pocket to them, landing on the floor with the same wrinkling sound that heavy paper makes when the wind decides to lift it.

Clarke bends and reaches over her drawn up knees, to find a roadmap turned over on the sticky laminate.

She picks it up, the bright orange of the cover flashing like a warning beacon. It’s not a map of Vancouver, it’s one of a town she’s never heard of, but the logo to the company that produced this is in the shape of North America, and Clarke gets caught on the things scattered across the country.

Someone’s drawn over the logo in the top corner, started from Louisiana and made their way up through Nebraska, turning through in a path to Washington, finishing somewhere above the edge of the logo’s border. Clarke brings the map closer to her face to see the doodle clearer, and it takes a moment, but the thick smudge of a red sharpie slowly starts to morph into a shape she can recognize.

There have been stars strewn across this country.

_‘Little stepping stones that mark each place,’_

She hasn’t lost enough to forget that.

She flips the map around in her hands, her grip light and dainty like it might shatter if she handles it too roughly, but her heart is accelerating, and the caution pleaded by the amber shines no light to the green of his shirt.

Unfolding it, until it is flat and too wide to rest in her lap, Clarke’s eyes roam hungrily across it, hunting for anything else that might not belong. There are places that she’s never heard of that have been circled by blue ballpoint, but she’s only looking for red.

And it takes time enough that she has to double check whether or not she imagined the stars, but she finds a scrawl on the page behind the backend of the map, underneath the orange warning light. She probably should have guessed it’d be there; to write there, someone wouldn’t have had to unravel the whole thing, and Clarke folds it back up before she takes it in properly.

It’s unfamiliar handwriting. Distinctly male and even more distinct is the way it moves across the page, in the way that hands who have held pens for so much longer than normal just can do. It’s an author’s handwriting, with sharp, jagged edges and curves that lean too far to one side. Curly C’s and bending L’s and I’s that haven’t been dotted.

“Clarke what is-”

“Sh,”

She smooths the page down, like that might help the writing become a little more legible. The lines are crooked, created under darkness and with too much haste.

It’s a slow process, figuring out what they read. And then it happens in the way that waking up should work. The words focus to single points, and they roll like water from a knocked over glass.

“ _Every day, each foot in front of another,_

_I saw a star fall from the sky._

_And she was cautious, knew value like the back of her hand,_

_I thought she might be defending them._

_With so much voice, who wouldn’t ask for the stars?_

_Then I watched her talk to thunder, who hated the stars more than anyone,_

_Who shielded humanity from stars like the scarred ozone, who shared that burden with her,_

_And she had no idea._

_She was clueless to how many she could hold in her fist or how many banded like tinsel through her hair,_

_Or how many whispered a cosmos when she laughed. Truth is,_

_Clarke didn’t steal them. They fell willingly._

_They found her eyes and became the streetlights that her father named._

_They made her eyes into a forever,_

_And I’ve seen the ocean swallow the stars, when the moon melts._

_I have seen waves that withered just for the stars, am I the moon?_

_Could I be the moon?_

_If she is the sea and the sun and the stars and everything in between,_

_Do I get to be the moon?_

_I didn’t just fall in love with her, I fell into her._

_I kissed the sea and I drowned and I cared,_

_Only for the horizon for a lifetime, because I never let myself hope to get beyond it._

_She is better than the horizon._

_Chasing the horizon is a hungry, lonely game. Melting to the sea,_

_Is braver._

_I didn’t just fall in love with Clarke, I fell into her._

_And I will keep making crowns with broken hands, until they’re enough,_

_To give her the stars.”_

Clarke sits and she breathes, because that’s all she can bear to do. Every little bit of her is breaking down, melting underneath the heat of his reddened words, his burning, torrential words.

“Clarke what is it?” her mother asks impatiently from her seat.

But she’s hurting and on fire and the line between hate and love is so thin that it has become a tightrope. And this has thrown her off of it.

The amber was right to be a warning, and the red was right to be a stop sign, but Clarke stands to her feet, and clutches the map, recognizing its strength and using it as a shield over the veins in her wrist.

“I have to go,” she manages, and Abby stands to her feet too, to try to stop her, but what is it worth in comparison to this?

She hates him and she loves him, and she _can’t_ hate him.

She gets called back, and it’s not like she won’t return. She’ll get the clothes and her mother’s validation some other day.

Clarke tumbles down the staircase and she knows which door is his because she’s seen him run inside so many times. She knocks, twice and then three more times, and struggles to catch her breath while she waits. And then she kicks herself for expecting an answer because he won’t be here. Not on the day he gets for himself.

She knows exactly where to find him.

Going back up the stairs is just another hurdle in the marathon she’s been thrown for, and the air is heavier than it’s ever been when Clarke throws the fire door open, clinging to the lever for relief.

And Bellamy is stood in front of the pedestal that acts as a barrier to falling, looking out to the world behind a wall.

The sound of the door clashing against its hinges is enough to alert him to the fact that she’s here, and he turns in surprise, his eyebrows reaching even higher on his face when he sees the flames in her hand.

And they’re a sprint away from one another, half of the building between them, but Bellamy knows exactly what she’s got, and Clarke knows nothing of what she can say, what she can do, to tame the anger now that he’s sparked it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'I'm waiting for you,'  
> \- Slow Down, Twiceyoung
> 
> I was going to at least try to write something more subtle, but I don't think this fic is in any way subtle. I'm not skilled enough for that. Sorry.


	35. But if you loved me

Clarke doesn’t know if she imagines the trigger that goes off somewhere in the distance, down below the miles that they’ve been lifted through. It happens the second his eyes meet hers, Bellamy’s gaze so heavy and _there_ , that it sure feels like gunfire when it finds her.

She needs to keep one hand gripping to the lever of the door, the map hanging low by her side, folded with the edges pressed to perfection after being lost in a pocket for so long. For months.

There’s that message hidden somewhere inside of those perfect creases, buried underneath doodled streetlights. Bellamy’s face has turned a ghostly shade of white, his jaw loose, his forehead all wrinkled, lined with a thin sheen of sweat thanks to the gentle but omnipresent heat.

With both hands tucked away into the pockets of his pants, Clarke can only guess at the balls he might have his fists in. His shoulders span a straight line, rigid.

She could kiss him, so easily make that sprint to where he is. It’d take seven, maybe eight seconds and then she’d be there, and maybe he wouldn’t hesitate in holding her by the waist. He’d just take her in his arms and lift her to meet him and Clarke would finally get to kiss him. Maybe. Could. Uncertainty all wrapped up in one dainty map.

He looks so unsteady, and for one tiny second, worry floods through her at the imbalance in his heels. He’s too close to that ledge. What if he tips back? What if he falls?

Clarke takes a step away from the door in the center of the roof, steps over some of the piping that runs along the ground and pinches the map tighter to make sure it won’t drop. He could follow, perhaps mirror her steps.

His eyes are trained so tightly on hers, there’s a pull so solid between them, that she’d follow if he moved. But he doesn’t and she doesn’t say anything.

What can she say to him? He knows what she knows, he’s read what she’s read.

Bellamy is frozen for longer than Clarke can put into relative time, his only response a blink or three every minute. She can’t even see him breathing.

And then, after too long, after silence filled by nothing but more silence, Bellamy clears his throat. It’s a raspy, choky sound, and Clarke draws to it like a moth to a flame, like moss to a tree.

And he does it again before he speaks.

“Say something,” he squeezes out. Clarke doesn’t know if she’s ever heard his voice sound so low, which really is something consequential.

He hasn’t looked to the map since he first caught it in her hand, and she wonders if he hates it. He could hate it. She’s tempted to hate it too.

So she asks him. Or she tries to. Honestly, there’s no thought trail between her mind and her tongue.

“What is this?”

Her arm lifts, as arms tend to do when someone is making a gesture, and the map lands in the corner of her eye. She needs to know the orange, if he burnt it or set fire to it.

His eyebrows sink carefully, almost like he’s letting reality settle in, almost like he’s relenting to something.

She’s so angry and she wants to kiss him so bad and he looks so tired.

“At the time, it was a… panic. I thought I’d probably never see you again and I wanted you to know,” he says, taking a hand out of his pocket, reaching up to scratch lightly at the back of his head so it gives him a chance to dip his eyes.

“You wrote this?”

He nods weakly, shoulders shrugging, almost apologetic.

“This was you?”

“Clarke,” he warns, meeting her gaze as she steps closer. She just wants clarity, and the more she replays her name in his words through her head, the less it sounds like a warning and the more it sounds like a pleading.

This is a ballgame. This is a back and forth that she needs to figure out how to navigate otherwise she won’t get what she’s looking for. She doesn’t even know what she’s looking for. Still…

“About the cottage?”

The way his face just morphs each time she asks a question, it gives her something valuable. He seems confused, hurt maybe.

“It’s about you?” he answers, as though Clarke needs to be eased into that.

No. She can’t give into it, not the innocence that he lets out so rarely.

“‘He didn’t fall in love with her, he fell into her,’- it sounds-”

“Just,” Bellamy cuts in before she can finish whatever she’s about to say.

“What?” Clarke stills, quietens.

“‘He didn’t _just_ fall in love with her, he fell into her’. That’s what it says,”

There are clouds scattered through the sky behind his head, unremarkably warm, unnoticeably noticeable. She wishes it were raining. This feels like the kind of conversation to have when it’s raining.

But nothing has felt really, truly, right since Clarke woke up, so it wouldn’t now either.

She takes a moment to recover from that blow. The sting of his confession. Reading words on a page is one thing, hearing him admit to something like that, it makes the ground feel like it’s tilting a little too far to one side.

He can probably see the weight of her breath as it floats coolly past her lips, and he’s wincing. He’s apologizing with pain all over his face.

He didn’t want her to read it.

She can only make this into a joke. Otherwise, she’s going to cry much too soon to get anything out of this.

“Did it hurt?” she tries, her lips twisting softly. Falling, like the way he’s made it out to be, seems like it hurts. Hell, Clarke realized she was in love with him on the day she tore her face up.

He tries to smile back. It’s a courtesy, Bellamy must see, to play along with civility, because that’s exactly what civility is: it’s a game.

“Sure,”

This is so ridiculous. They’re skating around one another, so gentle, so unbearably light after she’s just read his soul bare. She should be shouting and rabid and sobbing.

“What do I do now?” she gushes, slumping into herself, with that still somber smile on her face. It’s stupid.

“What you want,” Bellamy says, like it’s that simple, and he steps away from that ledge so slowly. “That’s what you’ve earned Clarke. You get to do whatever you want.”

“Except I don’t though, do I?”

“Why not?”

Because she woke up wanting one thing. One unreachable, fleeting thing.

No. He doesn’t get her warmth. He’ll get what she came to give him, and she’ll get what she came to collect, and his words are pretty, but she knows they mean nothing now.

“Bellamy,” she starts, one foot in front of the other, so timid that it makes him meet her eye. “Was this a lie? I’ve been trying to understand it all in my head, thinking I couldn’t ask you. You’re still here,” she points to him, just in case he doesn’t know where he is. “I get to ask you, and I’m going to because I’d like some closure.”

“Closure?”

“Is this a lie?”

“No,” again, there’s conviction there that she so rarely gets anymore. Does she even deserve this much conviction? Does he even know how much conviction there is in his voice? And even if it weren’t in his voice, it would be there still in his eyes.

“So when you wrote this-”

“The night before the hospital,”

“You meant what you said?”

“Of course,”

And it’s _ridiculous_.

“What do you mean ‘of course’?” she laughs, maybe ten feet away from him. Is that bitter? Is she bitter? Good. She should be bitter. “How can you say of course? You’re not certain. The only thing you’ve been certain about is making sure you’ve had as little to do with me as possible. Don’t make out like it’s ridiculous for me to believe that this is bullshit,”

“It _is_ ridiculous,” Bellamy argues, stepping closer but raising his voice. She can see his freckles from here, and the color has returned to his face now that he’s had time to digest all of this. Clarke doesn’t even think twice about storming towards him.

“No, it’s bullshit!” she gets louder. She wants to be louder.

Clarke trips on another one of those wires lining the ground on her way forward, and he says her name as though it might calm her down, but it won’t, and he knows that really.

“It is complete bullshit. You’re either an idiot or a liar. You either convinced yourself you felt this, you told yourself things like this to try to fix whatever shit you were ignoring, or you convinced everyone else that you cared,”

He’s starting to bristle, the edges and curves of his face hardening and closing off.

“If you’re a liar, good for you. Because you did an amazing job of getting us, getting me, to buy it. And if you’re an idiot, then I’m glad you’ve woken up. You _don’t_ feel any of this,” she pushes the map forward so that it hits his chest. “You never did, and you really, really don’t.”

“Hey,” he snaps. “Don’t tell me what to feel. You don’t know-”

“Feel happy!” Clarke shouts. She leans into him to try to find some of the man that she’s known him to be, but he’s a silhouette. And she may as well be a silhouette to him. “Feel good about yourself Bellamy. Feel something. Give me something other than this-”

Bellamy waves a hand between the two of them, finally gesturing, finally not putting a blockade on the interaction.

“No, you don’t get to decide what I felt. I know how true those words are, don’t you dare make that into nothing!”

This is the angriest she’s seen him. This is the most of anything that she’s seen in him for two months, and she wants him to be angry. He should be angry. At least with anger, they might get somewhere. And Bellamy is nothing if not conviction.

“But it is nothing!” she might spit in his face. It’s an accident, but it’s not done with regret.

“But it isn’t!”

“You sound like a fool in this,”

He doesn’t wince or recoil in the way that she thought he might. Instead he pushes on.

“That doesn’t make it fake. Or invalid,”

“Yeah Bellamy,” she smirks at him, traces the flickering of his eyes, feels herself drift towards him because that’s how gravity works, and then she pulls herself away out of his orbit before she falls. Clarke stumbles away, wrenches away, enough for them both to have the space for clarity. “You keep telling yourself that.”

“Jesus Christ,” he grasps, fisting a bunch of his hair in his hand in that frustrated way he does only with her. “I’d forgotten how ignorant you can-”

“Ignorant!? Do you even know what that means?”

“Well, I didn’t exactly go to Stanford but-”

Oh, her blood runs cold just from that.

“Don’t you dare,” she snarls at him, stepping back even further, ashamed that he could even bring that into this.

But it’s Bellamy’s turn to chase after her, and he catches her wrist in his hand before Clarke can get out of reach, brings it up level with her shoulder, and every touch they share is electric, so of course this hurts, or tingles, or something.

“I never lied,” he says, simmering, crooked nose leaning closer to hers but not close enough, never close enough. “To you or to myself.”

“And how am I supposed to know that?” Clarke refuses to give in, even if she knows being held by him is good. It’s a selfish kind of good, a good that isn’t going to help anything but her. “How does that mean anything after what you’ve done?”

“I…”

“And if you need reminding, Bellamy, then let’s recap, shall we? You left me at a time I needed you most,” her voice has faded back with the lack of a need to shout, not when they’re like this. Not with the map pinched tight to her leg, or his fingers around her forearm that are squeezing perhaps a little too much. There’s something travelling up her throat, heavy, creating pressure behind her eyes. “I woke up, _freezing_ cold, and I wanted you, but you were nowhere. And I thought, okay,” she tries to smile, but it’s impossible when his eyes are practically bleeding into hers. “This is a burden for everyone. If he needs space, he should have that. Time, maybe he’s busy. And then you ignored me, and hurt me, and made me so angry that I hated you.”

With an expression still hardened, but eyes still just as intense as they’ve ever been, Bellamy stays silent, and Clarke has started. She’s spilt the past month of anguish and she’s not done, and it feels _good_.

“Who are you? Seriously, who are you now? I once knew a man, who would stay awake with me all through the night if that’s what it took to make me feel safe. I knew a man who tore through a building, a fucking labyrinth, knowing perfectly well he might not get back out, just for the chance that I was still in there. Who told me I was stronger than anyone else he knew, who knew humility, and jumped into a rapid to save his friend. He did it without thought,”

“I…”

He starts, but again, that gets lost.

“Who are you?”

She wants to prod him in the shoulder but he’s holding her hand. No, her wrist. Not her hand.

“I don’t know how to answer that,”

“Then try. You owe me at least, to try. I trusted you. With everything I had, I trusted you. And you left me out to dry and I still have no reason, no actual reason, why you were treating me like I was nothing of what we had. So I want my reason.” Her voice catches each time she speaks about trust, but she’s angry enough to not dwell on that. He knows her breaking, he should get to hear it too.

“And I don’t have one good enough anymore,” he sighs, retracting his hand back slightly, and pulling hers with it.

“You think one ever would be?” she practically whispers. “To do something like that? But this man would have tried.”

She raises the map again with her spare hand, to make sure he knows exactly what she’s talking about.

“He’s still me,” Bellamy presses, not tearing away from her gaze, not running away but it’s too late.

It’s too damn late.

“It’s not fair for you to sit around and wait for something else to fix you. That’s not how it works. You don’t get to be mad at the world, you don’t get to take it out on the world because you’re too weak to fix yourself,”

It relights something and he rages again, breaking the clouds in the sky so that the blue becomes one smooth blanket.

“My _world_ ended the second you hit your head on those fucking steps,” he spits, pressing in. Clarke can see the indent on his bottom lip from where he’s been chewing it.

“And mine ended the second I woke up. The second I realized you’d given up on me,” he opens his mouth to cut back in, but she will not be silenced. “You’re a coward Bellamy. I spent so long thinking I was weak, but I am not the one who gave up on you. I didn’t give up on you!”

“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know how much of a failure I am? I know Clarke. I know I let you down. That’s all I know anymore!”

“You did more than let me down, Bellamy,”

“I know!”

“No you think you know. You know nothing!” he might be holding her, but her fist still drives forward into his chest, to wake him up, to make him see something that maybe she can’t even see right now. “You know absolutely nothing, and I’ll tell you why you know nothing: it’s because you weren’t there. You weren’t there. I woke up and I thought I was dead. And they told me I was alive, but I didn’t feel alive.” Her voice is running liquid, catching on the weighted air, catching on the minute glimpses of walls breaking down. This is hurting him. She doesn’t want to hurt him, but maybe this needs to hurt. “I felt like a ghost in my own body and I was weak and broken for so long. You promised me you wouldn’t break me, and you did!”

“Yeah, well you broke me too Clarke!” he roars, his eyes glistening and ready to melt, and he pulls her closer, forcing her eyelashes to flutter closed at the proximity.

“But I didn’t want you to be broken. I wanted you to be more than that. More than running away and finding another sidepiece,”

“Echo!?” he practically laughs, incredulous, still bringing her into his space, so naturally that there’s no way he knows that they’ve gone from being on opposite sides of the building to two people next to one another.

“Who else?”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing with her Clarke?”

“You tell me,” her feet lean further forward, bringing her up higher on to her tiptoes. “You let me believe what you wanted me to believe, and you know it,”

“No. You know what? You don’t get to throw that in my face,”

“That is not what I’m doing,” Clarke rolls her eyes, but it’s exactly what she’s doing, and she throws his hand away because it’s so fucking warm.

“ _You_ were the one who told me to find someone else,” he pushes, letting her know he thinks it was absurd for her to even suggest that.

Maybe she did that while she was really dying, a part of her last few days that aren’t there anymore. It sounds an awful lot like something she would have said. She remembers it being something she wanted said.

“I just wanted you to be happy,” she says, hating herself for sounding so small.

“But I hate that. I _hate_ that you asked me to look for that in somebody else when you knew perfectly well that I was already in love with you. It’s selfish Clarke, and it wasn’t fair for you to say that,”

Jesus Christ. This is the third damn time he’s given her that, and it still shakes her to the core. It feels out of body each time, like it’s not Bellamy telling Clarke that he’s in love with her, it’s a precious kind of treasure. It’s a rare thing to be bigger than what you are. Being told that he was in love with her, it makes Clarke feel big. There’s a strength to it, and despite everything, it makes her feel strong.

Whether he’s still there or not, whether he feels those things or not, there’s a strength to the love he gave.

This man in front of her, is raw. He’s lost all hope of hiding things. It’s not a game anymore.

“I was dying Bellamy! How on Earth was I supposed to know that I would live through that?”

“ _I_ knew you would,” he pleads, stepping back out of this bubble. “ _I_ was the one who had faith when nobody else did because I knew you were enough of a fighter to pull through. You had accepted that me and you were through on the night you told me your hand got infected.”

“You gave up on me too, eventually,”

“No, Clarke, I didn’t,” and maybe there’s something behind that. Maybe there’s something to take from that where she’ll have to read between the lines.

“Then what do you call the disappearing act? What do you call treating me like a stranger?”

“I couldn’t…”

“I know that I hurt you Bellamy. I know that. But I didn’t choose to do it. That’s the difference between me and you: you had a choice and you chose wrong,”

And isn’t that just the crux of it? He can wax metaphors all he wants, but he chose wrong. Clarke wrenches her glare away from him, looking around on the roof and expecting some sort of destruction to be visible in the distance. Maybe a volcano erupting, or a flood barreling onwards. They’ve moved so far from where they met, not having travelled in any particular direction, towards any particular place, but they’ve turned around the side of the building. Walking forwards and walking backwards, and she isn’t sure who’s pushed at the other one more.

This isn’t done. Maybe this won’t ever be done, but it’s done for today. Maybe next time it rains, they could get somewhere. Perhaps this needs rain.

She spins on her heels, facing the sky that doesn’t contain Bellamy within it, but she can’t bring herself to walk away yet.

“Clarke,” he tries, not taking his hand back.

She lets the map drop to the ground. Doesn’t even put any force into letting it go, she just loses it and hears the pages flutter in a non-existent breeze.

She makes it three steps away from him before he’s calling for her again, that same pleading tone, asking her to stay.

“That’s it Bellamy. It’s done. What more do I have to say? What more do I have to give?”

“Just, just let me say what I need to say,” he’s trying, thinking on the spot, clearly worried about what might happen once she’s walked away from this rooftop, this place of something else between them. Here, she sees her version of Bellamy.

Maybe he never did become a shadow. Maybe he just wanted to be a shadow, and maybe he wanted her to see his shadow.

“Why do you deserve that?”

“I never deserved it,” he says, almost frustratedly. “We knew you were too good for me from the start. We knew I would drag you down all along.”

“No. No, you don’t get to make this out to be inevitable. This was a choice. You made your bed-”

“But it _was_ inevitable. Wasn’t it? I told you I’m not the hero,”

“So that’s it?” she asks, snorting, walking back towards the entrance to this secret escape. “You just live your life accepting the fact you aren’t good?”

He mumbles incoherently. With the added space between them, Clarke can only catch the ‘not enough’ that he utters. She’s a few feet away from the door when his footsteps act as bass drums against the solid, ill-maintained surface, and then he’s not behind her anymore.

“Look at what you made it through,” he breathes when he overtakes her, hand running through his hair as a nervous tick. Clarke can see his want to reach forward, to hold her, but her arms are folded across her chest and she needs out. “Clarke I am so fucking proud of you.”

He says it as though, out of all of this, it’s the only thing that matters. A bit like an afterthought if not for the simplicity behind it. It’s a rush of impatience, him waiting for so long to tell her this meaningless thing.

“But you don’t care,” she needs to remind him.

“How can you still believe that?”

“Believe what? That you forgot about me? That you could treat me like a stranger? I’m damn sure of it, Bellamy.”

“That’s not- that’s not what I wanted you to see,”

“Then what did you want me to see?” she asks, mocking him.

“That I am nothing!” he roars back, strong enough to freeze her up. And it does. It does freeze her up, because Bellamy’s lips are as wet as his eyes, his eyebrows pulled distraught, leaning in towards Clarke to remind her of their height difference.

She swallows thickly as Bellamy drifts on both feet, a lost piece of driftwood being torn by the waves.

Moments pass, and Clarke can see the door, but it is shut. It’ll take effort to open it. That’s pretty much enough of an excuse to stay in this state of in between.

The breeze picks up some as midday approaches and a strand of her hair flies into her face, brushing by her lip and across her cheeks. His curls shudder underneath it, and her arms left exposed by the thin t-shirt are riddled with goosebumps.

Music. Songs. Lullabies without that retched violin, are something she misses. And she’s been left to wonder why it’s only now that she wants it.

Here, in this moment, Clarke understands why it was only Vancouver that brought her that longing. She always wanted to keep music, to keep listening, but time spent with Bellamy was a step backward and a step forward and dips and lifts and maybe a twirl or two when they got lucky. He gave her the music she craved without either of them realizing that.

The wind is telling them both something, in her whispers, but Clarke can only ignore it. Bellamy’s eyes are fire on hers, flickering down to her mouth momentarily, a camera’s flash.

“That I can’t help you,” he says gently, painfully quiet, tipping closer to her. “I let you die. I sat back and watched as you were dying and I couldn’t do anything to save you,”

He clears his throat and Clarke watches in envy as a tear draws over the corner of his eye, rolling down the side of his face.

“You deserve someone who can save you. You deserve that and worlds more,”

“But you don’t understand,” she hums, jealous of the ease with which he’s letting himself cry. Even if it’s one tear. “I never wanted more. I wanted you.”

The guilt that smears itself over his face is almost unbearable. She’s been forced to bear so much, and this isn’t over. This can’t be the end of them.

But here, right now, she is too in love.  And here, right now, she’s not sure that she can bear the thought of falling out of it.

Or of him falling out of it. She doesn’t know. She knows he had love for her, but time finds a way to melt skin and bones and intimacy in a way that fire can’t.

So Clarke ignores the map some yards away, cast on the warming concrete, and ignores the love of her life as she brushes by him, escaping the scrutiny of the sun, leaving the shattered clouds, running from the floods that are chasing this rooftop.

She wanted him to fight. She’d consider Bellamy calling after her, once, twice, colliding into the fire escape door as she slams it in his face, to be fighting.

But she’s been inspired by his tear, and that flood in the distance might have been incorporeal but the one behind her eyes is carnal. She’s got a mountain to descend, and in her haste to get away before he can catch up with her, she trips down the stairs a couple of times.

He said she could fit stars in her fists, in her hair, in her laugh, in her eyes. He let her eyes become an ocean, he said they swallowed the stars.

Bellamy calls for her again, and she’s sprinting down a staircase as he follows behind. Clarke remembers a time when they were running towards one another, her up, him down, blood and screaming and gunfire everywhere, but still towards one another.

And now they’re the only two people that exist on this plane, this tower of flights, and he’s calling after her with just as much vigor as he did back at the hospital, but Clarke is crying.

He can’t see her cry.

If only this staircase lasted forever, maybe he’d be able to catch up to her. If he had enough time to cover that space, then her running wouldn’t be anything compared to his. But she reaches the door to their shared floor and types in the numbers so quickly that they don’t register to the lock and she has to do it twice more before the door makes a sound and the latch releases.

Clarke sprints towards her room, loses control so fearlessly that she thinks she might just be punching the keys that control the lock. Raven isn’t in here, but Clarke doesn’t take notice of that until she’s behind her door, pressed up against it with a heaving chest and blurred vision, and the remnants of his shout still trailing the hallway.

Her room is so dark, shadows of the minimalist furniture only there because she knows where they are. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to make them out. Her sobs are the oceans he’s been talking about, and Clarke can’t bring herself to care whether or not the people in the rooms ten doors down can hear her.

They must know. They were shouting loud enough for the whole building to hear; they must be expecting an aftermath.

She has a moment of silence, more of a bubble around the frustrated, chaotic noises her own throat is making, to try to tame them. There’s no use. All of this month, these months, they’ve left her pent up with so much unresolved emotion; a dam that is long overdue for a break. The floodgates are open now, and they aren’t going to close anytime soon.

She can’t see.

This is her eyes giving back those stars. She’s crying, bleeding stars. She’s blinded but surrounded by darkness, and her fingertips are tingling with the touch of shadow, or the relief of finally confronting him about their everything.

She can’t lift her head from the flat of the door, strands of her hair catching between her teeth and flat underneath her eyes and against her damp neck. She might as well be a puddle of arrows and fleece, and emerald shirts, and stars.

The other side of the door becomes the skin of a drum, rampant knocking bouncing from wall to wall to wall.

“Clarke,” Bellamy asks for her, too soft for the sound he’s drilling. Ignoring him is the only thing she can bear to do, not while she’s red-faced and patchy with downward streams.

Slowly, his knocking becomes less feverish, more rhythmic, a constant question each time he taps the same spot.

Bellamy doesn’t stop, but he calms.

“Clarke,”

She can’t ask him to stop either.

The knocks are a whisper over time. Present, almost soothing, and Clarke learns to cry, to sob in sync to them.

“Clarke, if you want me gone, please just tell me,”

Her knees give out, shaky and tired, and her back never once leaves the skin of the door as she slips down it, crashing against the floor with her legs out straight in front of her, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other elbow resting into the corner of it as she places a hand over her mouth.

He thinks she doesn’t want him close. He really, genuinely believes she’d ever want that.

“Clarke please,”

Please what? Please ask him to leave? Is he obligated to stay until she grants him permission to go? Definitely not.

That lava rises up through her throat, and even with a palm to her lips, Clarke can’t stop the whimper that runs through to the other side.

Bellamy stills for a second. It reminds Clarke of that point in the river of an hourglass, when the sand runs through all the way to one half, and time finally stops. There’s movement, walls thin enough to hear the faintest of sounds, and she hears him breathing heavily at the same level she’s balancing upon. He’s sat down, she imagines with his head pressed to the door just as hers is. Defeatist to an outside eye, exhausted to one on the inside.

His breathing catches at the same time hers does; Clarke turns her head to the side. A stilted, jolty motion, until her ear is pressed up to the surface, always craning to hear more from him.

Her cheek meets cold and she wonders if he could be doing the same thing. Maybe he has half of his face pushed just as tight to this shield, maybe he can hear her heartbeat from there.

Or maybe he’s got his head in his hands, knees drawn up to lean on. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

That was something missing from his map: maybe.

“Clarke,” he whispers through the wall, low enough that her cheek may as well be pressed to his.

The only thing she gives him is the sound of her choking now and then.

This is her day, a recovery day. That could be the reason why she goes to sleep against him, Bellamy’s breathing so loud that she can pretend he’s wrapped her up in him, pretend her arm around her waist is his, her fingers grazing her cheek are his. She’s still crying when she drifts off, perhaps she’ll never stop crying now that she’s started, and her eyelashes are so saturated that they might not be there when she wakes up again.

And it is drifting off. It’s not falling into sleep, no landing into dreams. She’s not the steamship, the one with a fissure through its side, sinking to the bottom of a soot ridden seabed, not when he’s here. Clarke drifts like a lifeboat would, aimless but riddled with the quiet after a storm.

Her last thoughts are of the sniffles her nose begins to make, whether he can hear that too, whether he knows she’s losing the energy to stay present. The type a sick person would make when they’re recovering.

 

…

 

Clarke rouses to the imprint of an orange moon behind her eyes, the kind that tests the water before it dives into it. Her face is sticky to the touch, her eyes heavy- almost hungover- her neck aching from having fallen asleep sat upright against the door.

Everything floods back almost instantaneously, and she has to consider for a moment, whether any or all of that was a dream. Then she hears rattling voices outside her black hole of a room, and he’s still here.

“There’s nothing I can say to stop you, is there?” he’s asking huskily, like he’s lost his voice and is only just finding it.

“Not at all,” Octavia answers him, making Clarke jump with the closeness of the sound. She must be sat at Bellamy’s side, perhaps slumped against his shoulder.

She’s scared to do anything at all, so she listens with hooded, still tired, eyes and a mind half in and half out of sleep.

“You’re practically living together now anyway,”

“That’s the spirit,”

Which is a little ironic, because he sounded resigned when he said it, not at all like he’s striving to understand whatever it is they’re talking about.

Clarke wonders how long she’s been sleeping for, how long he’s been on the other side of that door, or for how long his sister has been there too.

She touches the side of her face, expecting not to find skin, but to find another rapid. There’s a tacky contact, and her cheeks are puffy. Unable to stand to her feet just yet, Clarke lets her back stay sunk into his. She doesn’t know where to go from here; what he said, all of it, none of it, she doesn’t know how to transform that into something more.

“Bellamy, you didn’t give up on her,” Octavia says quietly after a while.

“It doesn’t matter. I let her think I did,”

“You are such an idiot,”

“Yeah, I know,”

Clarke breathes a little more deeply. Listening to their voices sound so honest is refreshing. Octavia’s words are hopeful if nothing else.

“You know you can’t just sit here all night? Raven will be back any second,”

“What’s the alternative?” he asks, hushed. “She needs to understand why I couldn’t-”

“Bell, even I don’t properly understand it. And if you expect Clarke to see you the way you see yourself then you’re pushing a lost cause. You didn’t give up on her, you gave up on yourself, so sulking is gonna do nothing but make it worse,”

“I’m not sulking,”

“You’re not fighting,” Octavia says as a reminder, accusatory but not unkind. There’s definitely the awkwardness that she confessed to Clarke between them. Perhaps that’s what happens when siblings lose a parent; the family fractures like the layer of ice over a frozen pond when blades skate across it.

That doesn’t mean they’re made from different stuff now, or unable to come back together.

“I thought, before the hotel, that she should hate me. And she should, God, she should. But I don’t want her to anymore,”

“What changed?”

“Something she said,”

“So what do you want?”

There’s a pause and Clarke clings to it, pushing herself up so that she hovers above the floor.

“Does it matter?”

“What are you two doing?” Raven’s voice rings loudly, slightly absent as she approaches this mile-thick door. Clarke listens out for some more footsteps, but it’s obstructed by the sounds of the Blakes shuffling, perhaps trying to make an escape.

She presses her cheek closer, trying to recognize any hostility in her tone.

“Clarke in there?” Murphy asks, his own closed off.

“Has been for a few hours,” Octavia answers him, but doesn’t sound like she’s moving to leave. Neither does Bellamy anymore.

“Is she okay?”

There’s silence. Maybe she should move or open the door and tell everyone what to do now. That’s what leaders do, surely. It does feel easier to take herself out of the loop for a while though, to listen to the scars of her family be people without her there.

She’s surprised when they keep talking to one another, even if it’s cold, and Raven and Murphy’s voices are travelling along the same chord that the rest of theirs are lined up to. Does that mean they’re sat out in that corridor too? They could be on the other side of it, maybe their feet are pressed to the siblings’ like teddy bears at a tea party.

“Wells told us what you said,” Raven says to them, probably just to Bellamy.

“Thought he might,”

“Well this is fucking weird,” Murphy breaks another silence, scoffing slightly.

Octavia snorts.

“S’been a while,” she says to herself.

“You could say that,”

“Now we just need some marshmallows, a campfire song and we might be able to pretend this is fun,” Raven hums, sounding like she’s smiling, nostalgia filling the space.

“Nah,” Murphy brushes her off. “I always hated marshmallows.”

“No, it’s something Bellamy said the day after we picked them up,”

“ _You_ picked _us_ up?” Octavia asks.

“Clarke saved your life. We definitely picked you up,”

“Yeah but she wouldn’t have had to if you didn’t make us stop. Plus, I totally could have taken that walker on my own,”

“Please, it practically had your neck between its teeth,”

Clarke finds herself smiling, eyes closed, wishing she could be taking part in this conversation. She’s still got her head pushed to Bellamy’s; she can hear his breathing, hear it bouncing off of her door. Maybe he wishes he could be taking part in this conversation too.

“You’re all playing for second best; I think you’ll find that I carried your sorry asses out of Nebraska all on my lonesome,” Murphy chips in, not sounding amused, but he never really sounds that amused.

It’s Clarke’s turn to snort at that and her laugh has never quite been subtle when it’s actually there; the sound- the one Cage called pretty in an attempt to remind her of his presence- radiates outwardly, and it’s a reminder of how out of place she is.

She should be on the other side of the door, the place where her laugh manages to reach, not swamped in darkness or drowning in the sorrows that her misfortunes have given.

And with her newfound ease, comes a tension. Nature’s attempt to address an imbalance; one person’s sadness must become another person’s happiness. One person’s comfort must become another person’s friction. One person’s something must become another person’s nothing. Nature likes to address imbalances. It might just be her only job. A job is something that gives purpose. Hence it might just be her only purpose.

But nature has failed. Another person’s death must become another person’s life, yet where is all of this potential life? Where has nature dredged up more life?

Nobody says anything. Her laugh was wetter than it would be normally, probably carrying all the residue of her outburst. There are people getting to their feet, whispering words too quiet for her to catch, so Clarke stands up as well.

She turns to face the door, becoming the pendulum of a grandfather clock, letting darkness peak into darkness.

Her fingers are grazing the surface of it, just one hand creeping up. Clarke doesn’t know if it is to brace herself against it, to put some distance between her and it, or if it is to touch him. Then her palm falls flat, level with her chest, and her forehead rocks forward to touch it too.

There’s too much quiet on the other side of the door for the rest of them to still all be there. She’s contemplating calling for him, seeing if she’s just reaching for thin air.

There’s a chance, a small one, of them being palm to palm. He could be stood up now too, he could be leaning one forearm over his head like she is. He could have his hand pressed to the same spot that she’s got hers to.

“Clarke?”

The rush of air that escapes past her lips is unpreventable. He’s here. He’s not gone. And for the first time in a long time, that isn’t scary.

He whispers it, so gentle, like he’s terrified of getting an answer.

His face might be inches from hers. There’s something simple in her want to hold his hand. Clarke imagines fingers balanced carefully against one another’s, getting ready to fall, ready to settle into the space made by the bits his hands don’t have, and his by the bits her hands don’t have.

She is tired of missing him, and of being missed by him.

Her other hand falls from the space above her head, drifts towards the handle to the door.

“Bellamy,” she whispers back and there’s some shuffling against the door, like someone trying to get closer, more contact and more scraping.

Clarke sniffs noisily, to settle some of that emotion back down.

Her grip tightens around the handle. It’d be so easy to let him inside.

“You’re okay,” Bellamy assures her, like he’ll be happy to remind her of that every single day from now. Like mountains could fall and she’ll still be okay. She doesn’t know if that’s because he thinks she’s strong enough to do so, or if it’s because he’s willing to protect her from the avalanche.

They’re lucky there aren’t any windows around: he could shatter glass with the delicacy of his voice.

Clarke nods softly against the wall, a few moments before she realizes he can’t see her.

She’s forgotten what it would be to talk louder than a whisper.

“So are you,”

She didn’t break him. She couldn’t have. She wouldn’t.

“Clarke?”

Another pause.

“Yes?”

“Ask me to leave,”

She refuses to let something inside of her sink. Everything is so up in the air, hovering, she won’t let things come crashing down too soon.

“Why?” she chokes out.

“Because I’m going to stay if you don’t,”

She wonders if that’s his attempt at making a joke. She’d like it to be a bit of a joke, and she smiles shyly at it even if he can’t see.

“Bellamy?”

There’s that scuffling against the door again.

“Yeah?”

She will open the door, she’ll take that step forward, but she’s got to say this first.

“You really hurt me,”

Clarke is glad she can’t see him either. Everything is fragile enough as it is, without his burning gaze on hers. She doesn’t want to see his eyes when they’re sad; there’s not a lot more painful than that. Giving him time, always giving him time, she pinches her fingertips tighter against his on the other side.

She doesn’t really know what she’s doing. It’s not an accusatory sort of pressure, nor is her acknowledgement of the pain. For a while, his presence has found a way to numb it, and it feels right to let that numbing back in.

She was numb before. She’s numb now. And numb feels better with Bellamy.

It’s not a reassurance either though. Clarke refuses to pity him or endeavor to feel sorry for him right now.

She’s not even waiting for him to say anything; what is there to say to something like that? He knows he did wrong, he could be hurting more than she is, why add to that?

And it’s with that mentality, that glistening silver line, that Clarke pulls down the handle and slips her hand from the face of the door as it opens to her.

Light molds shapes across the hard floor, oblongs irregular and original with each further pull. One thing that doesn’t change is the silhouette of his shadow which stretches out into her room until Clarke steps in front of it.

Why see his shadow when she could see him?

And his breath catches in his throat when he catches sight of her, in that cheesy rom-com way and Clarke wants to laugh. She wants to laugh. She wants to laugh. She wants to laugh.

Nothing is fixed, but maybe nothing is broken either.

Maybe things are just faulty, exposed, but still good. Maybe they can still be good.

His hair is all over the place, verging on a state that perhaps Bellamy can’t even pull off. That thought disappears almost as quickly as it arises. Clarke remembers the first time she got a proper read on his eyes, the first time she actually tasted the warmth of his breath, and she’s still overwhelmed by the sweetness of it all.

His cheeks are pinker than they normally are, almost blotchy, his freckles blending in some.

_I miss you. I miss you so much Bell, it hurts._

“Hi,” she says, shy.

His lips turn up at the corners, the first honest to God raw smile she’s seen from him. Unmasked by guilt, too overcome with relief.

“Hey,”

“Have they gone for food?”

“Uh,” he scratches the back of his neck, swinging around to look down either side of the corridor as though Murphy might pop back around the corner. “I think so.”

Clarke checks her watch, partly because it’s a distraction, partly because she’s curious what the time is. It’s almost seven, late enough, she supposes.

“Are you hungry?”

Bellamy’s jaw drops a little and he snaps his teeth shut once he remembers he has to reply.

“Clarke I-”

“I could eat,” she breezes on forward, having had enough of complexity for one day. Now she just wants to go downstairs, get some stale bread and an ounce or two of Jasper’s algae, and complain about it with her people.

“Yeah,” he says, still a little out of it. “Me too.”

So Clarke steps out of her room, lets the door click faintly behind her, and she brings all of her hair over one shoulder to keep the nerves at bay.

He’s got one hand in his pocket, the other hanging awkwardly at his side, the hood of his hoodie bunching a bit around his neck.

“I hear they’re serving pineapple today,”

“Good,” Clarke sighs, leading the way. “Today’s a good day for pineapple.”

 

…

 

To hope for a silence that isn’t awkward would be a bit of a lost cause. They both know it’s going to be awkward because they’re too busy watching the movements of the other one to be at ease. Clarke can’t figure out which one of them is more afraid that the other will take off.

He’s not a big fan of small talk, so they don’t try to make it which isn’t something she minds. She keeps running her hands through the ends of her hair for something to do, and Bellamy jogs down each staircase lightly, rushed, until he realizes that Clarke’s feet are a little slower and then waits at the bottom for her to catch up. Each time, with an innocent sort of expression. Blank, almost.

A few of her strands come out loose with every pass through her hair, natural since she hasn’t brushed it through in so long, and he ignores the way she shakes them off of her fingers. His laces are undone; to stop and tie them, Bellamy must realize, would make things a whole lot more awkward. Clarke is too warm in her sweater, but if she tries to take it off while they’re going downstairs, it’d probably end up in some sort of obvious injury.

Yet with all of these minor, slightly cringey details, she can’t bring herself to feel uncomfortable. Can’t help but know for certain that this, the way things are in this muddy water, isn’t wrong.

She pours her concentration into not tripping over so as not to think about the thinking going on inside his head. This isn’t the calm before the storm, this is the aftermath.

The storm has been and gone, the storm has torn down the lighthouse and this is them gathering the scraps, gluing pieces of rubble and brick back together, together, together.

Bellamy opens each door for her along the way, and she’s ready to snap that she’s perfectly able to open a door for herself, until she sees that he’s doing it absentmindedly, a reflex. So instead, Clarke heads on through and settles for rolling her eyes behind his back when he starts to race forward again.

Jasper and Monty are just heading into the mess hall when the two of them are starting to approach it, and something shifty sinks in her throat at the thought of walking into that long, extended mass of tables, twelve times as many people as there are tables, two times as many judgmental eyes as there are people.

But Bellamy is gesturing for Clarke to walk through the gap he’s made in the door, hand out, too low for her to take it, merely pointing, and it doesn’t feel like a red carpet like the first time she came here.

No. Now it just feels like going home.

Very few people actually look up to see who’s just entered, the steady exchange of people flowing in and out becoming a mellow sort of attraction.

Bellamy makes sure to close the door behind him, like the wind that isn’t there might cause a draught or something. When they meet eyes as she turns back to wait for him, he’s still got this tired smile in them.

“Murphy was right,” she hums.

His face drops.

“About the, about how this is weird. Not… anything else,”

She turns and they walk towards the food counter, her shoes clapping too loudly against the tiles.

Clarke jumps when his shoulder bumps into hers; she assumes it’s just an accident until he does it again. Bellamy’s got his head tilted behind him, angled just over Clarke’s, this seemingly infinite amused expression there. He nods softly, scared to bother her too much, but she’s too busy trying to figure out why this feels so normal.

“Your army’s starting to assemble,” he smirks.

She follows him, heart jumping when she sees Benji whispering into his friend’s ear, shooting literal daggers over to the two of them. Probably just Bellamy, she figures, noticing the angle of his eyeline.

Turning back to him, she flashes her teeth uncontrollably, even if it’s still a little shy.

“Gird your loins,” Clarke whispers back, head ducking somewhat under his, not too close of course.

Bellamy laughs, like actually laughs, head tossed back and everything, the sound something she’d so clearly forgotten given by the way it makes her shins wobble, but still mesmerizing. That rare, she makes sure not to forget it again. And she builds a wall around it, so that the next head trauma can’t kill it.

“You ever heard anyone actually say that?”

“Never. Did I say it wrong?”

“Not at all,”

They approach the counter, Clarke offering him a plastic tray, Bellamy dropping it when he doesn’t see what she’s doing, too busy holding on to the tongs and picking at the dried bread rolls to see which ones haven’t got any mold on them.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, bending down before he can stop Clarke from doing the same thing. And their heads inevitably clash when she reaches for the floor at the same time, which sends Clarke seeing stars.

“Shit,”

“Shit,”

It takes a moment where she’s too concerned with rubbing at the center of her forehead to notice much, then:

“Shit,” he winces, his hand coming up to rest on her arm and his face is so close all of a sudden, honey eyes, blossoming freckles, completely occupied with making sure he hasn’t hurt her.

His grip tightens a little, squeezing to get her attention to focus, as though it’s going to be focused on something else right now, and she hates having told him that he doesn’t care. He does care. He cares so damn much.

He’s looking into her eyes, holding her up, checking for injury like a bump might make her eyes cloud over, might make her pass out again.

“It’s fine, Bellamy,” she tries to laugh, shaking away the shivering crawling up the backs of her hands.

It sinks in slowly, blue on brown, not a cloud in sight, and her knees are on the grimy floor, both of them ducked under the counter on full display of the rest of the room, which could very well be empty.

The corners of his lips turn up, only after he’s squeezed her arm tighter, and his eyes are flittering all over her face.

“I’m not doing a very good job of this, am I?” he asks, sadly.

“A very mildly crappy one,” Clarke decides. “But I don’t know what I’m doing either.”

And that’s okay. It’s messy, but that’s okay. That isn’t what’s important right now. What’s important is the things they said today, the things she’s learnt. And she might not have his reason, but she has him, in a way that she thought she’d never have again.

Bellamy’s love might just be a memory. But _he_ doesn’t have to be.

And if he’s smiling at her, looking into her eyes with that gentleness, holding her up, then that doesn’t have to be a memory either. She won’t let it just be a memory. And the best bit, the bit that makes her mirror his smile despite all of the awkwardness, is that Clarke has a feeling he too, won’t let it just be a memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'But if you loved me,'  
> \- All I Want, Kodaline


	36. Ships of war to call me home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've put off posting this chapter for too long. Technically, I'm happy with everything I post, but on another level, I hate this chapter. So read this knowing that I hate this chapter, maybe that way it won't be so disappointing.   
> The following chapters, on the other hand, are genuinely my favourites (or at least ones that I have reread over and over).   
> Big thank you to everyone who has privately messaged me on Tumblr and to those who have left such analytical and heartwarming comments.

She’s always liked the height difference between them. His shoulders stretch clearly above hers, his lips in line with her forehead when they stand close enough… if they’re standing close enough. Broad-chested, insanely broad-chested, and hands twice the size of hers, Clarke has always liked that.

In girls, she liked it when she wasn’t the dainty one, when she could take up more space by mere presence. Even Finn was small, but Bellamy is different. Just his body, being around just his body, makes her feel like she’s being held.

So that’s why Clarke is smiling distractedly, a benign kind of smile, when they’re plating up, and it’s not because of anything else.

Not his awkward stumbling, the way he flinches dramatically when he grabs at the too-hot tongs. Definitely not the joke he makes about the old dude smuggling pineapple up his sleeve, leaning down across their height difference so that only Clarke hears it.

“Where’s Monroe?” she asks, like he might know the answer, as he’s checking over the rusted, pathetic pot of tea.

“Looking for a rat,” Bellamy hums, stirring it in his hand to get rid of the residue sunk to the bottom.

“Holy shit,”

Clarke turns, craning to see further out into the kitchens, almost dropping her plate. If there’s a rat in those kitchens then it could be detrimental; they managed to kill off half of a continent once, and that’s with minimal effort. Rats could probably spread the infection within a day if they get into this place.

Bellamy’s hand on her arm makes her jump. So does his low chuckle.

“Chill, one of the kids told her he saw one when he got bored of mashing potatoes. Started running around the kitchen with a broomstick to sell it,”

“Right, and they all just played along with it?” Clarke smiles, shoulders relaxing, watching the kitchens for a different reason.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Well that’s beside the point,”

“No you’re right,” he nods, calming a shit-eating grin by clamping his lips together and biting on to one of them. “You’re not a kid; you should know better.”

“Just because I’m twenty four doesn’t mean I can’t have fun,” she sulks back, watching her feet as they make their way towards Ark. It’s easier to look out for the floor instead of the suspicious glances starting to intensify. “It’s not like I’m twenty seven.”

“Low blow Griffin,”

Clarke lifts her head to respond to Bellamy, losing whatever comeback she’s got ready as she realizes how close they are to their table.

Their table.

And she loses the words on the tip of her tongue at the sight of Octavia sat down next to Raven, Lincoln on the other side, their hands interlinked on the surface of the table, but him distracted by his food. He’s probably not even listening to the discussion between the two girls which seems… normal.

Murphy and Wells are talking flippantly to one another on opposite sides, both appearing unaffected by the new additions to this group. There’s space enough at the end of Wells’ bench for Clarke and Bellamy, but she doesn’t want to push anything.

She doesn’t want to ask him to sit with her, because he’d say yes if she did. He’d probably feel obliged to do it.

She occupies herself with trailing her gaze across the rest of the table and finds herself unsurprised by the coldness of Echo’s glare. She’s not alone, but she’s radiating hostility in a way that makes it look like she’s five miles away from Gaia, who in reality, is at her elbow.

Clarke is so busy trying not to freeze on the spot from that, that she notices too late where they are. Bellamy is stood at the end of the table, waiting, gesturing for Clarke to take her seat next to Wells, and she barely has time to figure out where he’s planning on going.

“Say that again?” she asks, not looking at him so that she doesn’t have to risk disappointment. She slides her plate along the empty space; there’s definitely room for him to sit on the end.

“I said you should respect your elders,”

And then he’s moving in next to her, so fluidly that he clearly hasn’t overthought it in the way that she has, already beginning to eat before he’s even sat down.

She likes their height difference like this too; shoulder to shoulder, his pushed higher than hers so that her head would fall into that corner if she collapsed.

“You’re starting to sound like Roan,”

“Wow,” he chokes dryly. “Just keep hitting below the belt.”

She hides a grin by drinking some of the tea he poured out, barely warm but warm enough.

It’s strange to be at the center of something, seven people content with one another’s presence for the first time in so long, and it is stranger for it not to be strange.

Clarke watches as Murphy and Wells, who have had so much hatred for the Blakes, not even blink an eye. As Raven, who tried so hard to postpone forgiveness, talks to Octavia with ease. There is no ignorance here. No one dares to ignore the fragile past they share, but there’s a recognition that that’s exactly what it could be; the past.

They’re talking about training sessions, and after they decide a time to go to the gym together, Raven turns and invites Clarke along with them.

“She’s been drilling me to the ground while you were gone,” she says, not sounding too put out about it.

“Oh yeah?” Clarke asks, toes on top of Raven’s beneath the table.

“It’s called self-defense,” Octavia growls under her breath.

Wells snorts.

“Hardly,”

“You’re just saying that because you’re too soft to hack it,”

“Charming,”

Clarke gulps down the lump of algae in one and tries to hide the shudder that ripples through her. Bellamy’s smiling to himself when she glances carefully over at him and waits for him to explain what he’s laughing at with a raised eyebrow.

He simply gestures to her fork with his before feeding himself his serving of the green spongey shit.

Raven kicks her leg from underneath the table, drawing her away, simultaneously subtle and completely unsubtle. Clarke flashes her eyebrows back at her, both of them in the middle of everyone.

“I swear to God if I get sent out again-”

“You do realize this is your job, right? You signed up for the sole purpose of being sent out,” Wells chides, barely paying attention to Murphy’s wining. So many conversations at once, Clarke can barely keep up.

“To be fair, I didn’t exactly sign up,” Clarke reminds them, tossing a stewed pea into Murphy’s mouth because old habits die hard.

“Right because we just wheeled your hospital bed straight into the back of the rover,”

“Metaphorically speaking,” she sulks.

Clarke likes to think that Roan came to see her that day to see how she was doing, but she’s never been an optimist. She has always been rigged up to this job and it’s common knowledge.

The rest of dinner continues like that, aimless, casual conversation between neighbors at a table. Granted, Bellamy grows quiet, but it’s not like he’s unwilling to chip in his little comments. It’s a natural kind of quietness, sort of like Lincoln’s. One that feels like they’re just too busy trying to take everything around them in.

Murphy doesn’t speak directly to Octavia or Bellamy, but they’re on opposite sides, so it’s a speedbump that they can skip over for now. And Bellamy, well, he’s here. That’s simple enough for Clarke, at least for now. No chaotic declarations of love, no accusations or mentions of betrayal. Because he didn’t _betray_ or _lie_ to Clarke like she thought he did.

He’s just complicated; she’s just complicated. They wouldn’t be themselves if they weren’t. Clarke is merely finished with pretending that they are nothing to one another, not when she knows that it’s something neither of them wants, not deep down.

And she thinks Bellamy is done with it too, when he gets stuck staring at his potatoes for too long, the calm expression on his face like he’s in some sort of daze.

 

…

 

“This is useless,” Raven groans, back flat against the mats that the three of them carried in from the rec room through to the center of the gym. Clarke is pushed into the corner of them, knees bent up to her chest as she watches the two of them spar. “I’m never going to need to know how to cut off someone’s airflow.”

“You won’t be saying that the next time you get attacked,” Octavia says, brushing off her pants.

“Walkers can’t die like that and you know it,”

“Murphy said Roan can just snap their necks and be done with it,” Clarke adds, admiring the ease with which Octavia is able to scrape her hair up into a ponytail and tie it all while defending Raven’s advances.

“It’s different,” Raven answers her without much breath. “That’s to do with the spinal cord, not the breathing.”

“Walkers breathe,”

“It’s not necessary,”

“How do you know that?” Clarke asks, wincing when Octavia throws Raven over her shoulder again.

“Biology. Try it some time,”

“May I remind you of which one of us was studying at med school?”

“May I remind you of- okay,” Raven throws her arms up and slaps them back against the mats once she’s landed solidly. “This is ridiculous now. You really were going easy on me before,”

“Before?” Clarke smirks.

“How else do you think we sorted things?” Octavia asks her, taking a seat in the center of the maps as she waits for Raven to roll around and get back up.

“You literally fought each other?”

“Diplomatically,”

“Right, you might want to explain that,”

“Every round she won, she got to explain herself,” Raven shrugs. “Every round I won, I got to win,”

“As in…?”

“As in she got to be angry,”

“That sounds weirdly productive,”

“That’s because it was. You’re up Griffin,”

Octavia is smiling as Raven doesn’t even bother getting to her feet, just crawls the rest of the way to the edge of the fighting space and Clarke takes her time in rising, in checking that her arms and legs still work, just in case she gets caught off guard.

The younger Blake looks oddly like a shark, teeth glinting in the low light, circling her prey. It takes barely ten seconds before Clarke is being pinned down to the floor.

She ignores the voice in her head that tells her she could have used this during her first month of recovery, because while the strength training might have been helpful, she knows she did it on her own. And it’s not like Octavia is the only one who can fight like this out of all of them. Her brain might need time to adjust to the loosening of the blame she felt before, but it’s learning.

“You’re not even trying,” the brunette sighs, at least good-humoredly, on the fourth time she manages to wind Clarke.

“You’re the one who’s not trying,” Raven scoffs. “Hey, try the next one with your eyes closed.”

Clarke tries to laugh but it hurts her lungs.

“Wanna make it interesting?”

“More interesting than watching Clarke get her ass kicked?”

Clarke watches Octavia hover over her, upside down, and her vision may be a little dodgy, but she can read the mischief crystal clear.

“Answer for an answer?” she asks, leaning forward with her arms outstretched to sit up.

“Nuh uh, that’s not how this works,” Octavia grins as she holds a hand out to get her standing again. No, there’s a price for the answers but it’s certainly not that. Clarke’s going to have to beat her if she wants control over this, and she’s pretty sure that Octavia will hold back on her questions just as much as she holds back with the sparring: not at all.

“Fine,” she sighs, clapping her hands together to get rid of the thin layer of sweat. “Let’s go again.”

So they do, but this time it’s not over nearly as quickly. This time, Clarke actually manages to take the ease away from Octavia’s stance, has to make her move faster to keep dominance, and there’s a familiarity to the way that she fights. Clarke may not be a natural in hand to hand, but she’s a quick study, and she knows Octavia’s favorite ways to disable someone.

“Better,” the younger muses once she’s got her heel pressing into the skin of Clarke’s wrist.

“But not good enough,”

Octavia doesn’t wait around in choosing her first- probably of many- question, already looking around to the window the height of the wall, that points the wrong way for a window, facing into the building and not out of it.

“Who did that?” she asks, nodding to the cracked spider that Clarke remembers Bellamy driving through the corner of the glass.

“What makes you think I’d know?”

“Well do you?”

“Maybe,” Clarke answers, after a pause.

Raven’s warning sounds amused but curious at the same time, like she’ll play along with Clarke’s procrastination if it means getting to the truth eventually: “Play by the rules, Griffin,”

“Fine. Your brother. But you already knew that,”

“I figured it could have been an even split between you, Bell, and Murphy- either way, I knew you’d know,”

“Wait Bellamy did that?” Raven laughs, jumping up to go and inspect the stability of those fractured shards. Clarke has to look away when she starts to run her finger over the line of the biggest crack; the memories of broken windows and making that exact mistake are still a little raw.

Octavia simply scoffs as she releases Clarke and lets her stand up.

“Would you put it past him?”

When Clarke has stretched out her shoulders and made sure her hand isn’t sprained, she looks to Octavia.

“That’s what you went with?” she asks, thinking of the multitude of questions she’d been expecting.

“Why not?”

“Come on, next round,”

This one is even more competitive than the last. They are actually fighting now; it’s not just one girl throwing the other around, and for every elbow Octavia throws out, Clarke is able to block it with her forearm. It’s the sort of match that she’d like to watch back in slow motion, vainly. Each step Octavia takes closer to her, that familiarity rises, and she’s getting closer to the reason why it’s there so strong but trying to keep up is a distraction from that.

She gets to the point where her knees are either side of Octavia’s waist, both of the brunette’s hands pinned tightly, and she thinks she’s won when Octavia growls something that sounds like “There she is,” with surprising amounts of thrill in her voice. Then she does this strange twisty thing with her legs that Clarke can’t see to track, and they’re reversed, her completely caged by Octavia’s toothy grin, crooked like her brother’s.

“Fuck,” Clarke grits out through her teeth, having been so close.

“Why forgive me?” It’s not exactly brash, but it’s certainly bold. That’s something she’s always liked about their heart-to-hearts though, and she’s glad that that isn’t lost. That she’ll still get to have conversations that skip past formality.

That’s probably why Clarke decides to answer without much protest; Raven’s distraction with the wall of unsteady glass, and Octavia’s intimidating hold on her body contributors, but not deciders.

“Jeez, don’t waste any time,” she says, a way of giving herself more time to give a clear response.

“It’s called getting things out of the way,” Octavia counters, her eyes a lot softer than Clarke has become accustomed to seeing.

“You lost your mother, and your- uh- me. I don’t know what I would have done, but I get that you needed space. It was just awful timing, O. People make mistakes,”

“It was more than a mistake,” she confesses, shame evident, and Clarke hates shame.

“Yeah,” she agrees, because it was more than a mistake, but that doesn’t make it interminable. “That doesn’t make _you_ bad. You wanted forgiveness,”

“Sure,”

“And I was the dead girl,”

It’s important to remember how scarring that might have been, to see someone you trust weave between hope and defeat. Clarke doesn’t want to forget that she is the reason this whole thing became such a mess in the first place; whether it was intentional or not. She thinks for a moment, knows that this is the time to clear whatever air she wants cleared.

“But you should have been there for those two,” she hums, nodding over to Raven.

“Yeah, I… I know that,” she says, and Clarke knows that Octavia might have both of them back, but she hasn’t forgiven herself yet. It’s got to be genetic, that ability to blame themselves for so much.

“So we’ll move past it. We kept each other alive for months-”

Raven breaks her off with another obnoxious scoff.

“That’s debatable,”

But it’s not. Not in the way that Clarke was made to _feel_ alive. So she smiles warmly at Octavia, who has her eyes downcast and barely has Clarke pinned, even if her weight is on top.

“You’re still my family,” she says, because it’s not untrue. The kind of bond they formed out there, it’s not something to just kill off.

“Me?” Octavia asks, in a way that leaves something unsaid. In a way that says, ‘Just me?’

“That’s another question,”

“Right. Let’s go again,”

The next round is over much quicker, with Clarke finally figuring out how to maintain the control she’d only been chasing in the fights before. Octavia is breathless, but not red faced like she is, a curious expression riddling over her.

“You fight like your brother,” Clarke realizes, the lightbulb in her head finally turning on. He did that: tried to get close to take over. The both of them control by taking up space, pushing their opponents back, force their bodies forward. Clarke didn’t stop that when she fought him, she embraced it. So she does the same with Octavia.

“What?” Raven spins, paces back over to the mats to make sure she heard that right. They’ve probably got a lot to catch up on.

“He- we, no wait it’s my question,” she rushes, unable to articulate what actually happened in the woods. She looks down to Octavia and finds there’s only really one thing she needs to know right now, only one thing between the two of them that needs clarifying. “Are you doing okay now?”

Her smile is as soft as her eyes, gentle in a way that her battle costume would never be. That kind of smile that not a lot of people are going to get from her.

“Yeah Clarke,” she mumbles. “We’re gonna be good.”

 _We._ Clarke likes her idea of ‘we’.

“Okay, that’s it,” Raven sighs, grabbing Clarke by the elbow and Octavia by the shoulder to get them both to their feet. She keeps hold of them when they’re standing. “I’m calling for a group hug.”

Clarke rolls her eyes, glad that the rest of the gym is empty.

“Ten seconds,”

“Thirty,” Octavia pushes.

“Twenty,”

Raven’s pulling the two of them in by the neck before they can protest to that, and Clarke settles into that familiar space of what may as well be her sisters. The scent of Raven’s rusted zip on the bomber jacket that has still managed to survive the war, and the softness of Octavia’s hair tickling her nose, is pure warmth. So she’s smiling, and she’s not even bothering to count down those valuable seconds.

So she’s probably been lied to, and they might be stood awkwardly gripping to each other for longer than necessary, but perhaps it is necessary.

Octavia opens her mouth as they start to extract themselves; Raven cuts her off before sound even starts to leave her lips.

“We can talk about the big bad Blake some other time,” she waves, just knowing what Octavia felt the need to say. Clarke’s knees go a little weak. “This, here, is about us.”

And she’s right, but… “Just one thing?” Clarke asks hurriedly to stop herself from chickening out.

They might as well get that out of the way too.

“Sure,” Raven nods back.

“Are you alright with him?”

Octavia is standing on the tips of her toes as they wait for Raven’s answer, but she takes her time, trailing her eyes across the ceiling as she deciphers something, sketches over the blueprints in her head.

“Well,” she starts, then considers again, a tentative, almost tired, smile seeping into her expression. “You forgive one, you’ve got to forgive the other.”

“What changed?”

Raven coughs and then scratches her jaw but complies. If Clarke could resist asking, she wouldn’t do it. But she can’t.

“I realized he hasn’t changed all that much. And I guess I don’t know why he did… what he did but, it’s not fair for me to make your hurting mine, right? Otherwise the whole world will end up hating everyone and where would that leave us? We’re all a little selfish, but he’s a whole lot more selfless than he lets us see,”

And Clarke loves her for that.

She’s got people in her life who will take her pain and make it their own; Bellamy and Murphy, and there’s a running theme of emotional instability that comes with burdening something like that. It’s not unhealthy to do it, but it can be intoxicating, especially in times like this.

So Clarke loves her for embracing the need to fill the role of a friend; of someone who can feel empathy, instead of sympathy. To use her head, instead of her heart. To say, ‘I know you’re hurting, I see the pain you’re feeling, but I’ll be here as a shoulder,’ instead of that powerful, ‘I need to feel what you feel, I need to sap your pain and bear it, so that you don’t have to’.

And while her mind races through the importance of that, her words slip on the simplest thing she can take from it.

“I saw it,”

She always saw how selfless Bellamy is, how it runs through his blood and fuels him more than oxygen does.

Octavia hums at her side, careful, meaningful.

“You did, didn’t you?”

And Clarke nods, because love couldn’t be superficial or shallow. It exposes imperfection and the nicks in the frame of someone, and she saw his shattering, damaging selflessness with painful amounts of clarity.

She remembers his words:

_“And I will keep making crowns with broken hands, until they’re enough,_

_To give her the stars.”_

She definitely saw it.

 

…

 

Clarke lays flat in her bed, on top of the covers; on a night like this, there’s no use for a blanket. She’s so tired, she can hardly keep her eyes open, but the dust particles aren’t falling from Raven’s creaky mattress like they normally do. They’re just kind of floating, and defying gravity like something from a fairy tale.

She doesn’t know when she started seeing pixie dust in dirt, or seeing friends in the shadows, but she yawns and doesn’t mind breathing in pixie dust all too much.

Clarke doesn’t dream of falling, or of hurting. She dreams of running; not away from something, but towards something. And she likes this dream too.

 

…

 

Clarke wakes up to artificial light and Raven leaning half in and half out of the doorway, voices muted as she adjusts to hearing them. Wearing just a towel, one hand draped against the side of the door, Raven blocks out whoever she’s talking to. And Clarke clutches to the last few moments of rest she’s going to get for the day. There’s a team meeting around midday, and she’s either going to get sent out or she’ll get loaded with days of watch shifts.

Either way, it’s just past five and the sun will only now be rising.

Clarke realizes it’s Bellamy on the other side of the door when it’s too late, by the time she opens her eyes, Raven is letting the door close.

Clarke is sat up against the wall, hands bracing on either side.

“Wait was that-”

“Oh how I’ve missed this,” Raven sighs, too sarcastic to be sincere, before Clarke can ask, skipping over to their wardrobe to get dressed.

“Missed what?”

“You two being… you two,”

She tries to get her groggy mind around Raven stepping in wearing a towel and how that corresponds to Bellamy being at their door at five in the morning.

“He, uh,” she brushes her hair back from her face and stretches her legs out. “He okay?”

“He’s panicking,” Raven shrugs with her back to their beds.

“Why?”

“Because he’s always panicking,”

“Raven,”

“He was asking for you,” she turns, wearing the hint of a smile and a clean vest top. “I thought you were asleep, sorry.”

It’s not like that was a serious concern for Clarke, and she’s glad to know that Raven and Bellamy can move towards speaking terms again, but it’s a relief when the thought of him looking for her, and only for her, turns into actuality.

Raven tosses a spare change of clothes so that they hit Clarke clear in the face.

Clarke looks back to the door, as though it might have opened, as though he might still be standing there.

“What did he want so early?” she asks, trying not to sound like she cares all too much.

She shrugs again.

“He was doing that puffy chest thing. I think he was nervous,”

“Should I…?”

“Nah, just ask at breakfast. Move it Griff, we’re late for jogging with O.”

 

…

 

But Clarke doesn’t get to ask at breakfast because he’s not at the table when they walk into the mess hall, or the dropship- which she has a feeling is something the kids came up with, considering the line of permanent marker along the door, at the height of her knee which reads its nickname in jagged handwriting.

To be fair, they get there a little early. Clarke still has her hair dripping wet, tightly braided and forming a puddle on one side of her t-shirt. It probably wasn’t a good idea to wear grey, considering the visibility of the wet patch.

She doesn’t read too much into Bellamy not being here. She distracts herself with complaining about the cold, barely-boiled potatoes. When Octavia and Lincoln walk through, without the other Blake on either of their arms, she really does try not to read into it then either.

It doesn’t work very well. He came to find her at five in the morning, it could have been important.

But she’ll see him in the rec room, Clarke reasons with herself, staring into the abyss of a green pond. That green isn’t the green she likes.

 

…

 

The green she likes also doesn’t come in the form of Cage’s jacket; his collar turned up to the point where it’s probably scratching his neck. He has no right to be on Ark floor, none at all, but he’s stood, his shoulders pressed to the wall by the entrance to the entire floor, on the inside.

It’s not like he even had to be on this side, it’s like he just wanted to prove he has access to anywhere he wants.

Clarke and Raven brush past him as though he isn’t here, not willing to feed into his store of ego. Still, that doesn’t deter him from trying to catch up to the two of them, chucking his greeting like phlegm.

“Hey Gorgeous,” he beams as they’re approaching the rec room.

Raven folds her arms over her chest, both forced to draw to a stop when he glides in front of them, forced to stare at their target from a distance.

“Who’s Gorgeous?” Raven grits out from between her locked teeth.

“Whichever,” and it’s pretty obvious that he means that from the shrug of his shoulders.

“Charming,”

They’re left in silence for a moment, and then another one, awkward to the tenth degree. Clarke settles for tapping her feet, the surface of her skin crawling with the thought of him here, in their home ground.

Wells is slipping into the meeting room, casting back an apologetic glance before he ducks away. It’s too far away to call to him, and he knows not to try to defend them.

Cage’s eyes trickle slowly to Clarke’s neck, smirk leaning so far to one side that it might actually topple him over.

“Your mother’s throwing a fit upstairs,” he says, gleefully.

Raven makes a sound at the back of her throat: unconvinced. Miller and Bryan walk past them on their way inside a room that seems to be radiating comfort now.

“That doesn’t sound like Abby,”

“Not my problem,” he doesn’t bother looking at Raven. “Just thought I’d let you know since it’s probably you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, you know, you die, she’s upset. You get lost, she’s upset…”

Clarke resists punching him in the face, distracted from his ongoing taunt by Bellamy, Octavia and Gaia turning the corner nearest to the rec room, the latter reaching for the handle to the door before she escapes inwards.

The siblings notice the three of them though, and Bellamy’s hair is soaking to the point where it looks like the curls have all been gelled into place. Ordered chaos.

“You stay slumming it with the uh…” he looks suspiciously to Raven, his silence alerting Clarke to his trying presence. He even catches Bellamy and Octavia when he tosses his head back, gesturing behind him when he carries on. “them, she’s upset. It’s pretty obvious what the common denominator is.”

She wonders if this is some sort of flirting tactic: make the girl feel like shit and she might think they’re actually on the same plane of humanity. Either way, it makes her arms feel itchy.

“Piss off Cage,” Raven scoffs, fists tucked into the divots of her elbows. 

Octavia is talking intently to her brother, both of them muttering seriously to one another. His eyes drift towards Clarke’s, but they’re too far away to read properly.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,”

She shoves past his shoulder, making it clear that Clarke should do the same. So she does, and her wrists feels about ready to drop off when his hand latches around it, tugging her back around to face him. She stumbles a little, not expecting it, but she stops herself from tripping over.

Bellamy and Octavia are over her shoulder now. She just wants to be able to see him again, wants to know if that was concern in his expression or something else.

“Clarke, I hear you’re sticking around for a few days. If you need some company…”

So it was a flirting tactic.

“Really?” Raven bites from behind her, and Clarke looks back, sees Bellamy leaning against the wall with his hands in the pockets of his camo slacks, making no move to disappear inside, jaw clenched painfully. She nods to his boots, too much distance for it to be clear that she’s simply saying hi. “You won’t be too busy digging your hole?”

Cage’s thumb strokes over hers, icy to the touch, and she yanks her arm back before he can touch her hand anywhere else.

“She trying to call me a fox?” he smirks, leaning in close like they’re sharing a joke between the two of them.

“A rat, I think,”

His face drops. If it weren’t so close to hers that she can see the pastiness of skin that hasn’t seen sunlight in months, it’d be funny.

“Cute,” he bites, glaring at her friend.

Clarke’s getting ready to stomp her foot down on to his, just to get him away, when someone bumps her shoulder and leans a little into it.

“Everything okay here?” Octavia asks, fake smile wide, eyes bored.

She’s got her hair in that fancy braid today; battle costume.

“Everything’s fine,” Clarke assures her before she can worry too much. “Come on, we’ve got a job to do.”

Bellamy is still at the doorway when they get to it, eyes narrowed just a bit, his gaze flickering between Clarke, behind her, and nearly everywhere else.

He takes his hands out of his pockets as he pushes himself up, only to shove them into the back ones.

“Hi,” Clarke says, brushing her arm with her fingernails.

“Hey,”

“Ugh,” Octavia groans at her side. “I can’t stand that guy.”

“Join the club,” Raven snorts, pushing her weight against the door and nodding casually for Octavia to follow. “We’re making t-shirts.”

Clarke watches after them, watches as the sound leaves the space they left empty and settles into quiet before she remembers she’s not alone now.

Bellamy is hovering on his tiptoes when she lifts her head to see him.

“How are you?” he asks.

“I don’t know what that was,” she tells him, not bothering to skirt around what he’s really trying to ask.

He shakes his head calmly, this sorry smile on his face, as though to say, ‘you don’t have to explain yourself’.

“He tried it with O a few months back, before her and Lincoln became a thing,”

“And Raven apparently. At first I thought it was just attention he wanted,” Clarke shrugs, but swings around on the pivot of her waist to look back at him, like their exchange might be permanently etched into the floor. Cage is still here, talking to Roan. “But now I don’t…”

If it isn’t personal, he wouldn’t be throwing her mother in her face.

Bellamy clears his throat and tips forward some more; his boots creased at the point where his foot bends.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quiet. “For what I did in the gun range.”

Clarke thinks back to it but can’t work out which part he’s apologizing for. The fighting, or the lack of it.

She nods. It’s probably one of many apologies due; she’ll get better at dealing with them as they go.

“You weren’t at breakfast,”

“Yeah, no, I had to take Niylah down to the med ward,”

Clarke must react a little too hastily.

“She’ll be fine,” he rushes. “I found her passed out in the gym. I think she’s got the flu,”

“Oh,”

They’re enclosed in silence again, the sounds of Roan and Cage’s conversation drawing to a close reaching Clarke before they reach him.

“Well,” Clarke sighs, lips twisting into a smile, rocking back on her heels. “You didn’t punch him this time.”

Bellamy grins at that, hand coming up to rest at his neck, eyes rolling in a way that makes her own smile widen.

“To be fair,” he winces. “I didn’t punch him last time either,”

“Right. You just shoved him up against a wall,”

He nods, tongue running over his teeth beneath his top lip like he’s trying not to smile. Clarke wants to push at his shoulder, to tell him it’s alright to smile.

“I hear you beat O,”

“Yeah,” she snorts. “Like once.”

“Well,” he scratches at the nape of his neck. “If you can beat her then _he_ is literally nothing.” He jerks his head over to Cage with that familiar conviction. She gets thrown a little by it, and he’s so cautious that he notices the way she falters. “Just if you don’t. I mean, you knew that, but I thought-”

“Bellamy,” she breathes, ducking when his head snaps back up. “I’m okay.”

They won’t be treading on eggshells forever, Clarke knows that. It’s not like she can’t embrace it when they are.

“Good,” he sighs back.

Clarke steps closer and doesn’t shy her face from his. They don’t have to just stare at the floor when they talk to each other; he’s not nine, she’s not eight. They aren’t kids at school being forced to become lab partners.

“Can we talk, later? I think it might…”

Bellamy’s shoulders relax and so does the rest of him. Clarke can’t even describe the relief that washes over her at his reaction. He wants to sort this out just as much as she does.

“I came to find you earlier,” he mumbles. “I couldn’t sleep properly without you knowing everything.”

“Yeah?”

He nods, opens his mouth to say something more but gets cut off as Roan calls out her name.

“Griffin, I need a favor,”

She breathes in deeply and breathes it back out before turning on her heels to meet him. Never enough time to say what they need to say.

“Sure?”

“We need someone to cover Niylah’s watch shifts,”

“Oh. I guess I could do that. So I’m not being sent out?”

Roan shrugs, not meeting her eye. The remnants of her smile drop.

“This is my mother, isn’t it?”

Roan doesn’t answer her, giving all the answer she needs. She won’t take it out on him, he’ll just be the messenger. Or the secondhand messenger considering Cage’s lingering smirk at the end of the hall.

Roan looks carefully to the man over her shoulder.

“Blake this doesn’t concern you,” he says, unaware of… well, everything.

Clarke goes to cut in, but Bellamy speaks too fast.

“No, I know,” he nods uncomfortably, but keeps rocking with his hands in his pockets.

“She was meant to be on duty now,”

“Right,” Clarke grimaces, not waiting too long to receive Roan’s pointed tone. She hopes he’ll take that as a cue to leave, before Bellamy can slip away. She feels him breathe heavily behind her, letting her know that he’d rather that too. Still, Roan makes no move to go inside before Bellamy does and Clarke doesn’t know if he’s doing it for her sake or if he’s genuinely oblivious. “I guess I’ll just…”

If she were to lean back, she’d be resting against Bellamy’s solid chest. She doesn’t do that, but she turns away from Roan to face it.

“I’ll see you,” she says quietly, remembering times when she’d put her palm over his heart just to be closer to him.

“Yeah,” he hums back. His head is tilted forward, following the line of the rest of his body. “I’ll see you.”

Clarke hovers for a moment on the heels of her boots, laughs at herself when she pictures how awkward she looks, then nods at Roan when she walks past him and ignores the confusion he’s wearing.

“Come on Romeo,” she hears as she’s turning the corner to her room, and she can’t resist glancing back, to see Bellamy waiting outside the door, watching after her until she gets out of sight.

 

…

 

Once Clarke settles back into reality, that is, the matter of her life that surrounds her friends without containing them, annoyance starts bubbling up through her throat and she makes a mental note to go and see her mother, and demand to know why she felt it necessary to put a stopper on someone else’s responsibilities- responsibilities that have absolutely nothing to do with her.

Taking her bow down the stairs is pretty mindless; she’s too busy fighting the urge to march up to the floor of the commanders. It’s a good distraction from thinking about the meeting she’s missing out on.

The breeze that hits her face reminds Clarke of the pressure she felt behind her eyes only yesterday, of the volcano that no one else saw, of the ground that tumbled just for her. Well, not just for her. For him too.

It’s a muggy day, clouds not looking like they’re hanging low but still weighted. Still pushing the rest of the world into just two dimensions. Echo’s dead straight hair, all the way down to her hourglass waist, is clear from the entrance to the building.

Clarke bites her lip in preparation. It’s not like they have to talk to each other; it’s not like she actively dislikes Echo, but she’s not sure it goes the same the other way around. She’s stood as close to the lever control as she can be, as though she’s expecting the rover to come rumbling towards them any time now. She must know it’s parked around the back.

She debates with herself, on her way across the figurative drawbridge, whether she should say something. It’d be polite, and she’d probably do that if it were anyone else.

 _‘I get that her being alive made things difficult,’_ is what makes Echo different. That much raw truth, raw honesty, is something Clarke is too cautious to look directly in the eye.

Echo is wearing a leather belt, and when Clarke takes her place, she can see how she’s had to double loop the band around her waist, had to carve an extra hole for the buckle to shorten its diameter.

Her decision gets made for her, when the woman with powdered cheeks looks at her from the corners of her eyes, already cold.

“You aren’t on shift,” she says, ice underneath the humidity.

“Niylah’s sick,” Clarke shrugs back, her shoulders immediately tense. She doesn’t want to feel small around someone like this, knows that she has been through enough to be more than a comparison, and yet she can’t help it.

She knows now, with some sense of certainty, that Echo and Bellamy aren’t involved in the way that made holes in her stomach, but he could be. She’s made it clear that she wants him, and she’s so effortlessly beautiful. Fairy tale name, fairy tale eyes, make believe figure. She imagines Echo is the type of girl he would have gone for a couple of years ago; there’s a nagging feeling in her gut that tries to convince her the only reason he hasn’t made a move on Echo yet is because of the guilt he is experiencing.

Maybe, once they’re done trying to push away from the hostility, he’ll open himself up to something with Echo.

“Well look at you,” Echo hums, not wearing the expression that someone would typically wear with a tone so crammed with counterfeit niceness, fake cordiality, flourished ways of saying bitchy. No, her pretty eyes are unamused and blank. “Resident philanthropist.”

Clarke doesn’t want to acknowledge that she might have forgotten what philanthropist means. She can ask Wells later. Whatever it is, Echo makes it sound like an insult.

She hums in response, not sure what to say back.

Apparently Echo isn’t finished anyway.

“Don’t push yourself too much Griffin. Wouldn’t want you to break a nail,” which Clarke can’t help but think is a little ironic considering the smudges all around Echo’s eyes. “We managed just fine before you waltzed in, I’m sure we’ll be fine if you need some more rest,” she says slowly, tauntingly, as though she wants the space all around them to become filled with those words, until it reaches maximum capacity and sparks the oppressive air.

 _‘We,’_ \- there are so many versions of that word. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with them.

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stay,” she bites, bristling. Waltzing was her specialty, after all.

“You would,”

She knows that’s supposed to be a jab too, but part of Clarke doesn’t really get it, and the other part doesn’t really care.

In fact, she’s glad when they just settle into silence, because Echo is a closed off woman, in a way that is unnoticeable when she’s not the focal point. And she isn’t Clarke’s focal point, so she’s easier to ignore than most of the people who have resented her.

Raven comes out at around midday, claiming boredom, and settles against the wall by Clarke’s feet, knees drawn up to her chest as she complains about the summer heat, head to the sky, damning the whole entire world audibly enough to make Clarke laugh.

She’s still on duty by the evening, still a night’s worth of daytime left to go before sunset. The sound of an engine starting makes the warmth feel even heavier. Clarke hadn’t bothered to ask, had forgotten about it to be honest, when the next mission would be.

She knows they’re very rarely as long as the trek to Minnesota was, usually a couple of days. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re already leaving again.

Clarke feels ready to be the one to pull the lever but understands that Echo isn’t going to be the one to give her the shot at it. There isn’t a chance in hell she’ll give up that sort of control.

The familiar black car crawls around the corner of the main building, like an animal coming out from hibernation, peering and tentative, knowing it’s got all of spring and summer to relish in reprieve.

In reality, the rover will only have a few moments before it is cast back into the wild. It draws to a stop far enough away to have an adequate runway. Maybe one of these days, the gates won’t even have to open to help them escape. Maybe it’ll go fast enough to take flight.

She sees Murphy in the driver’s seat and rolls her eyes, sorry that he’s having to go out again so soon.

“Come on,” Raven says, nodding her head when Clarke doesn’t immediately follow her steps. “Let’s go make Murphy cry with an emotional goodbye.”

She feels Echo’s judgmental glare on the back of her neck as she considers; that pretty much makes up her decision for her.

They make their way over together, Clarke’s hold on her bow loose as she unloads it. Murphy’s getting out of the rover before they can reach him, tired smirk on his face.

“Medicine,” he says to Clarke, his only attempt to fill her in.

“Hospital?”

“Probably,”

She doesn’t speak the words ‘high risk’ out loud, but that doesn’t make them non-existent. It will be high risk; their pasts have spoken that much.

“Look after yourself,” Raven tells him deadpanned.

“Woah,” Clarke mumbles from the corner of her mouth. “Way to be emotional.”

“I will,”

“No but like actually look after yourself,” Clarke sighs, eyes drawn away from him when two people step out from the entrance to the building. “You have to come back alive and everything.”

“Alive?” he groans, like a teenage boy complaining about the chores his mother has given him.

“Alive,”

“She got a lazy eye or something?”

“Nah, Bellamy just came out,” Raven smirks, whispering conspiratorially to Murphy.

Clarke brushes the pair of them off, kicking Murphy’s boot on her way past him.

She knows when Bellamy sees her. It’s an odd sort of reaction. He was talking to Sterling, not unhappily, and it’s not like he grins when he notices Clarke making her way towards him, but something about him seems lighter.

She likes it, whatever it is. It feels concrete, and tangible.

He nods something to Sterling, before the other man smiles politely at Clarke and the two separate.

“You’re leaving?” she asks, trying not to sound disappointed before he steps closer to her, perhaps closer than necessary. They might be able to blame the noise of the engine. They should probably blame something. He’s got a black cap on his head, and it’s a new look but one that suits him ridiculously well.

“Timing, huh?”

“Maybe it’s a sign,”

Bellamy ducks his head, takes a moment, then he’s looking up again with a fading laugh still clear on his face. She’s missed that warmth in his eyes. So much. It is too easy to remember a time where he would be ashamed of his smile.

“I hope not,”

“So,” she breathes, wanting to feel his hat on her head for some reason. “A hospital?”

He sucks air in sharply through his teeth, wincing, not heavily.

“Yeah. Just a state over though,”

“Good,”

“Clarke,”

“Hmm?”

He seems nervous when she looks back to him from the filling rover, very nervous. Her shoe is sweeping against the gravelly ground, a metronome to their goodbye.

“I was going to wait…” he starts, pausing when she steps closer to hear his quietened voice properly. “I know we need to talk, but I was sat outside your room for a while yesterday and I knew all of the things I needed- or uh, _wanted_ to say.”

Bellamy moves to unclip the chest strap of his rucksack, reaching across his torso to dip his hand into the pocket of his shirt.

“So, I, well I wrote this. It’s pretty much everything,”

He’s holding a wad of A5 sheets of paper, folded over themselves in three ways to form more of a scroll. The corners are clearly frayed and bent, but she can’t see any of the handwriting yet. Like the map, it’s been folded away from sight. Hidden, like those lumps of metal that scientists go looking for in caves- the ones that become valuable.

“We _should_ talk,” he reinforces before he hands it over, as though he’s trying to make it clear he isn’t going to hide behind this, whatever it is.

Clarke knows she should probably ask something other than the thing she does ask, still…

“How did you get paper?”

His lips curve to one side, despite the pinkish haze of his neck.

“Monty,” he answers, humoring her. It’s strange; she’d forgotten they might still have things like that.

“Not stolen goods then?” she mirrors that cautious smile, thinking back to the leather jacket she abandoned to the floor of the passenger seat, the cigarettes they smoked together. The memory of a hot pink iPod comes flooding back, and she kicks herself for not remembering it sooner. She’d been meaning to ask Jasper and Monty if they could find a way to charge it once they got back but must have forgotten. Now that she has that, Clarke can feel the weight of it still resting in her quiver.

“No. Not stolen,”

Bellamy hands it over, thick as a wallet when the sheets are folded. She’d make a joke about how he didn’t have to write a bible, if he hadn’t called it everything.

She puts it in the pocket that hangs from her knee, one of a dozen along these bulky uniform slacks. Lincoln and Nyko climb out of the cargo space; Bellamy looks back to them hesitantly.

“I think we might be holding them up,” she nods, leaning up nervously.

“Right,” Bellamy mumbles, eyes cast down to his feet, perhaps missing the light-heartedness of it. She’ll let him off with that one though; his knees are practically shaking. “I guess I’ll just…”

She puts her hand on his forearm, maybe just to get him to look at her before he leaves. It works. He freezes under her touch, surprise escaping the shadow his face is encompassed in thanks to the hat.

“I’ll see you,” he hums, echoing her from this morning.

“I’ll see you,” Clarke whispers back, hoping he can hear everything else in that. Hoping he doesn’t deprive himself of her wanting him to come back, of her telling him to be careful.

He nods once, twice, shakes his head to clear it, then her hand falls and she steps away before he does.

Bellamy looks back before hauling himself into the passenger seat, giving Clarke a small two-fingered wave, almost like a salute but nowhere near it, and a kind smile. It feels an awful lot like an apology. She can’t figure out if he’s saying sorry for what he’s done or for what she is about to read.

She watches, in mild envy, as Echo releases them into the burning world, as she closes them back out again in routine. The wheels don’t leave any tracks in their wake, which is probably a good thing. Clarke would follow them else.

 

…

 

“So how does it work?” Clarke rushes before she can stop herself, breezing past Monty and stumbling into the lab. “You guys have a backup generator or something?”

“Huh?” he asks, rubbing his eyes, clearly exhausted.

She feels bad for storming in, but he was up working anyway. He’s not the type of guy to ignore his own discomfort; if he wants her gone, he’ll ask.

“You use computers,”

“And?” he slumps down at the counter she remembers getting wasted at, holding his head up as he waits amusedly.

“You have power,”

“And?”

“Where do you get it from?”

He watches her for a moment through heavy eyelids, probably trying to decide whether or not to let her in on this. She must be doing something right because he does.

“There are solar panels on the roof,”

There are? She hasn’t seen them. But Clarke supposes she’s been a little distracted each time she’s stormed up there. And she’s only ever gravitated towards one half of the roof; perhaps they’re on the other side of the fire exit.

“But we’re off the grid?”

“There is no grid,”

“Right,”

“Why do you ask?” he stands as Clarke leans in the doorway, swiping some empty glass beakers from the side and dumping them into a sink at the end of the room.

“Because I found something,” she lies. She doesn’t know how to reference Bellamy in casual conversation, how to say that he did something for her, without it being a big deal, or strange to people who don’t know him like she knows him. She’s got the iPod tucked into the edge of her sleeve, almost embarrassed about having it. It might be a selfish thing to do; to have this when nobody else can. Clarke has been told that she is privileged all her life and has hated knowing that it is true. Being privileged isn’t evil, but it brings with it so many bad connotations that she knows has never fitted.

“Sure?” Monty prompts, patient and kind. Clarke steps properly into the room. If she’s going to ask anyone, she can ask Monty. He’s probably the guy who will judge her least. She can’t imagine him judging anyone ever.

“I was wondering if you might be able to charge this,”

He takes it from her like it’s a weapon, or a bandaid, or a protein bar, like it is a necessity. He flips it over between his hands, checking the screen for scratches or checking the charging port for what it needs. He pulls the greyed earbuds from the iPod, hands them to her and doesn’t react at all. Not until he says,

“Nightmares, huh?”

Clarke takes a moment to respond, having to shake herself out of the shock.

“What?”

“It’s cool,” Monty nods, waving for her to follow as he walks around to a nest of wires. “Jasper gets them real bad. He’s on the top bunk so they’re pretty hard to ignore. Something like this,” he holds it towards her so that he can have both hands free to search for the right cable. “Would probably be better than what we do. At least you can go to sleep sober,”

Clarke nods, oddly sad about hearing this. Jasper is so rarely seen without a smile. If it’s fake then he must be an extraordinary actor.

“I think it’s getting better now,” Monty says thoughtfully. She wonders if he’s spoken out loud about this to anyone else. “Maya doesn’t drink,”

“Maya?”

“He’s smitten,”

“They’ve been here for two days,”

Monty shrugs. “He’s smitten,”

“Who knew the Ark would be such good matchmakers?” Clarke wonders, thinking about the level of commitment between Octavia and Lincoln.

He hums in response, not meeting her eye.

“There we go,” Monty sighs contentedly, pulling a long black wire away with his hand. “This will work. Give it the night and it should be all juiced up,”

“It’s that simple?” Clarke asks, not sure why she’d been expecting something more complicated.

“Course,”

“Thank you Monty,”

“Don’t mention it,” he grins.

“See you tomorrow,”

 

…

 

Clarke showers before she goes to sleep. She spends some time with Raven against the wall that holds their bunk beds. She refuses the admit that she’s procrastinating looking to the brick in her knee pocket.

Raven’s got guard duty starting at midnight. Clarke takes her watch off for the build up to that, knows she’ll just be hanging a carrot in front of her face otherwise.

When Raven leaves, they say goodbye in the doorway, and Clarke makes a show of flicking the light off, to make it look like she’s going to go straight to sleep. Not that Raven is convinced nor bothered by whatever she’s trying to hide.

She leaves the light off as she avoids crawling under the covers. Instead, Clarke slumps down on the floor and hangs her head back on to the mattress. She’s got a torch in her pocket, just figured she could read the letter using that. But the crinkling of the paper is too loud for their bedroom and it’s so hot she can barely breathe.

And Clarke has spent too long not being able to breathe.

So she goes to the place that holds the moments where they have felt most connected to one another, where she has been able to look at Bellamy and feel so much more than determination to stay alive.

She goes to the place where he can be here without being here, where she can look out into a pitch black horizon and try to make him out in the shadows. Where Clarke can hang her legs over the side of the building and remind herself of her own mortality. Just a fall from death, just a stumble towards heavy stars, which are out and unashamed.

She wonders where the map may be; it’s not up here on the roof. She hopes he might still have it.

Once Clarke is comfortable, holding her own back straight without a rest, sneakers tied tight so she doesn’t lose them to the ground, she opens her eyes properly and looks beyond the walls.

“Where are you, Bell?” she says into the wind, carrying visible waves of heat.

His letter unravels cautiously between her fingers, pinching it with both hands just in case her shoes aren’t enough for the hunger of the breeze. Clarke takes the time to count the pages, still putting it off just in case there’s something scary in here, which there is sure to be, and there are ten of them front and back.

She really does like his horrendous handwriting. When it’s not in Sharpie- probably a ballpoint pen this time- it’s even more like a writer’s. She would read novels in this kind of handwriting.

She also takes the time to fray the corners, to swipe them through the pads of her fingers, to make sure this a letter about her, to her, for her. No one else will get to ruin the corners of these pages.

She turns on the light of the torch, makes the mistake of looking directly into the beam, then shines it out into the distance just… to check.

It’s not as bright as the spotlights that polka dot the wall, but those spotlights are for everyone. This torch is not.

She breathes in deeply before she starts reading, and wipes at the moisture gathering at her eyelashes.

Gives up on that by the time she’s read the first word.

So simply, just simply, _Clarke_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Ships of war to call me home,'  
> \- Glory Days, Roo Panes
> 
> Please stop telling me to make them kiss. It won't make it happen any faster.  
> Also, don't think for a second that I'm letting this story go unfinished.   
> Em x


	37. Shall I stay, would it be a sin?

_Clarke,_

_I thought for so long that making you hate me would fix this. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I thought if I hurt you enough, you would never want to see me again and things would be as they should be. But you should know. This isn’t me making excuses or trying to convince you that I did the right thing. I’m not asking for any forgiveness because you shouldn’t forgive me. This isn’t atonement. I just hope this gives you the closure that you need._

_When we met, the first thing you did was save Octavia’s life, and I left you to die in return. When you fought for us to find survivors, you gave us the time to escape when you stayed behind, and I left you to die. When we found the cottage, you got jumped on by a walker and I left you to die. And maybe leaving you to go to the hospital was the right thing to do, but we didn’t find anything that could help you, and if the Ark hadn’t found us when they did, then we all would have died._

_You lost your life in my arms. You probably don’t remember any of it. I hope you don’t because you were in so much pain. Roan and Miller broke through the closet we were in and I was trying to_ (There’s a gap, like he’s been waiting to finish the thought. It isn’t finished.) _because I ~~really wasn’t thinking, and I couldn’t~~ guess I was just trying to give you whatever life I could give. And they were trying to take you from me, but they were strangers and I was screaming, and you were so small. They were telling me you were gone and that there was nothing I could do and that I needed to leave you if I wanted to live but I didn’t. I couldn’t stand the thought of surviving without you. I couldn’t stand breathing if you weren’t. And so I held on to you and you might not remember it, but I do._

_Your blood was everywhere. Everywhere. I was covered in it. You were so pale, and you’d gone stiff and you looked completely at ease, but your body was rigid, and your eyes were locked shut. Roan and Miller grabbed my shoulders, but they didn’t exist._

_They’d parked the rover as close to the hospital as possible and Wells tried to take you, told me I was in no state to carry you and that he was a medic and he needed to examine your injuries but there was no way I could let you go until I knew your body would be safe from the walkers._

_Octavia and Murphy were already in the back when we reached the rover, and they were asking a thousand different questions and Murphy’s face went hard all over when he saw you and Octavia screamed._

_I lay you out on one of the benches and the rover was overcrowded with the others, the ones who got O and Murphy out. Your arms were in a circle around my neck and I tried to get out of it so that Wells could see you too, but you wouldn’t let me until he intervened._

_I was still shouting. I wasn’t making any sense and Wells was asking me questions like how long you’d been out for, when you’d cut your head, how much blood you’d lost, and I really tried to answer him because he was breaking behind the eyes. He still kept himself strong. He’s a good man- I knew on some abstract level he would be, considering how much you love him, but it was still hard to fathom._

_They didn’t tell us where they were taking us. Murphy stayed silent, Octavia cried against Raven’s shoulder, but Raven was paying attention to everything Wells did. I stroked your hair for the hour it took to get to the base, I cried a lot, I asked a lot of questions, but I couldn’t hear anything._

_Lincoln was there, he gave Octavia a flask of something warm because she was in such a state._

_We got inside the walls of the safehouse, and they let me carry you, directed me to where you needed to be taken. I didn’t process anything other than how weak your pulse was. Wells and Miller came with us, the others too, and I remember bursting into an empty room with so many empty beds inside._

_A woman came up to us and she froze the second she saw you. And Raven gasped from behind me. The woman sobbed and I didn’t understand. I thought it was because of the state of you. Maybe she struggled seeing pain. Wells shouted a lot. He had started to lose it by now and he shook the woman into action. She told me to lie you down on a random bed and she barked orders to other people, asking them to get this and that and I was still crying. It was that bad kind of crying, where my shoulders were spasming and I could barely open my eyes, but I didn’t know how else to exist. You were fading, faded, and I loved you with everything inside me, and I didn’t care about anything else_

Clarke has to pause for a moment. She clears her throat, even though she’s not about to speak to anyone any time soon. His words are simple, honest, clear, and they are like silk to the skin of her arms.

She runs her fingers over them, to feel his words some more. That sentence, that unbreakable sentence, is the last of this page, and he’s forgotten to put a period at the end of it.

Part of her doesn’t want to read any further. Her hands are shaking a little too much to turn the sheet over. She hadn’t realized how nervous she’d be until, well, now.

_The woman asked me who we were, me, O and Murphy, and Murphy was at the foot of your bed, stone-faced and people were trying to talk to him, Raven and Octavia, but he was just as unresponsive as you were. And I was too busy watching as a medic stuck these needles into your arm and started pumping crimson into it. And my hand was in yours because someone else was busy sewing the back of your head, but I couldn’t not touch you. Your fingers were cold, and your hand was fixed so you couldn’t feel me there, but I held your hand as I cried._

_Octavia told the woman we were your family, but she looked confused- she clearly didn’t believe her. Someone moved you a little, but they didn’t understand how fragile you were, so I snapped, and I told them to be careful, I begged them. And the woman told us that we had to get out._

_There was a lot of arguing, mostly Octavia, some Wells, but your hand was in mine and I was terrified. Miller put his hands on my shoulders and lifted me out of the chair I was in next to your head, and I turned around and punched him in the face because he was trying to take me from you. Then Roan was there, and I couldn’t fight them both off. I tried, I really tried, with everything I had, but I was broken, and you were breaking, and your pulse was dimming which seemed impossible._

_They threw me out of the hall, down to my knees, and I stood back up to get in again when they came back with Murphy, who had his head hanging by a thread, and Octavia followed. She told me later that it was because it wasn’t fair for her to be with you while I wasn’t, but she hadn’t known they weren’t going to let us back in._

_I kicked at the doors and punched them, and I broke three fingers. They’d locked them and Raven was still inside and none of us understood but no one tried to understand. _

_I remember how big those doors were in comparison to me, and I fought so hard against them, tried to knock them down, but they stood tall. All I could see was you on the other side and I thought you needed me. I was shouting so loudly that my voice left and broke too. Octavia says it sounded like I was being choked, like I had a rope around my neck. That’s what it felt like. Not getting to you made me stop breathing._

Clarke closes her eyes, like that might stop her from picturing that mental image. It doesn’t; it’s a painful flash as she pictures Bellamy against those doors, the ones that had seemed so intimidating on the day she saw them.

_By the time O saw that my fingers were loose and fractured, I was almost passed out against the doors. It must have taken a few hours. She grabbed me and pinned me down to the floor and held me there because she knew those doors wouldn’t give in, and neither would the people on the other side of them._

_I remember Murphy, when I turned and saw him, he was sat on the floor on the other side of the corridor, his legs out in front and his eyes on the floor and he had his hands and arms crossed. I was angry that he wasn’t reacting, but I was angry at everything._

_We sat outside of the med ward for two days, the three of us, and people came in and out but each time they’d make it so that we couldn’t get back in. Lincoln brought us food and water, but I couldn’t eat or drink or sleep._

_Murphy passed out against the wall the entire time. He’d sleep for eight hours, wake up and stay awake for a few minutes, until he fell asleep and slept for another eight hours. I think that was his way of coping. It took me a long time to see that but looking back on it, that was how he dealt. He just shut down, he let his entire body just close off. I think it’s a self-preservation thing. It didn’t seem human._

_On the third day of waiting to hear if you were alive, to hear from Raven who was still inside, Octavia asked if Aurora Blake was here. Lincoln knew exactly who we were talking about, but he hesitated to tell us anything._

_That was the first sign. He made sure to check that we were talking about a woman in her early forties with mousy brown hair, but he knew because of how much Octavia looked like her. He sat down with us and told us that Mom killed herself a week before. That was when Octavia closed off. I didn’t know how to react. I wish I could say it hit me harder than losing you. Maybe on some level it was just as bad, but the pain I felt when you died in my arms was insurmountable._

_Apparently she didn’t leave a note or anything behind. Lincoln said when there’s a suicide on base, it rattles everyone, even if they’re not uncommon. People had said that she was tired of ‘waiting’ and it didn’t take a genius to figure out who she was waiting for._

_So I’d lost two of the three most important women in my life, and the other one was grieving so much that she was unreachable. We were all out of reach from one another, all of us on another plane of mourning. On the fourth day, Octavia left the med ward and she told me she just couldn’t take it anymore. She didn’t come out of the room she’d been assigned for three days after that._

_I started thinking, finally thinking that day. You’d have been ashamed of how long it took me to start using my head, but when I did, things began to fall into a spiral. I was trying to figure out how to grieve my mother, but I had no idea how. All I could think about was how, if we’d gotten here a few days earlier, she’d still be alive._

_And those few days could have come from anywhere. There were plenty of times where it was me who held us up, but Murphy was right in front of me. And we went to Nebraska for him, and if we hadn’t done that then maybe we could have gotten here on time._

_I know that that isn’t logical now. But it was hard to think properly. So I began to resent him, and we argued a lot, and we both said shit because when I provoked him, he blew up. He let loose that it was my fault you weren’t alive, that it should have been me on that hospital bed, that I wasn’t strong enough to save you._

_You told me that he lost his ~~girlfri~~ person in Nebraska, and I got enough from the night before the hospital to figure out that it was his fault she died. I think he must have been seeing you in her, and me in him. I think he wanted me to be better than he was, but the damage was done the second you hit your head and he resented me for that._

_When we weren’t fighting, he was sleeping and all I could think about was you. How, all those times out there on the road, I let you down. How you forgave me time and time again. How you were twice the soldier I have ever been, how you listened to me talk and you didn’t judge my mother or make excuses for me. Every single thing I could think of that gave me a reason to fall in love with you further, I thought of another that said I’m not good enough for you._

_Because I knew it the whole time, and I let you, I actively made it so that we were together. You’re magnetic. You were magnetic all along, and I wanted, despite everything, to learn you and have you like the person I was and the times I spent talking with you were just brighter than any of the ones where I didn’t. For so long, I didn’t let it feel complicated. I was just a boy, crushing on a girl who had the looks enough to be out of my league, let alone all of the things that make you Clarke._

_Like I said, this isn’t me trying to ask for forgiveness. This is me setting the record straight. And one thing that has been told so wrong, is that I don’t want you. I let people believe that and I let you believe that and it’s just not true._

_Nobody is perfect. You aren’t perfect. It wouldn’t be real life to call you perfect; I know you wouldn’t want to be perfect. You, in my eyes, aren’t cut with smooth edges or ironed without creases, but you were real and raw and as close to perfect as anyone can really ever get._

_With all of the seriousness you hold yourself with, I’ve never found anyone who can make me laugh as much as you did. You are just funny: the way you looked at the world, whether it was ours or the one before, made things feel light and you transformed whatever overthinking you were doing inside into something that no one else had to overthink._

_The way you thought, that was something I marveled. How quick and how intelligent and it was intimidating, how rational you were. And there’s the resilience. It breaks my heart knowing that I made you think you were weak, or at least that you thought I thought you were weak. Because you just, so simply, are not weak. You are fierce and unyielding, and I don’t want to get poetic because you deserve more than my pretentious words, but I ~~saw~~ see the stars when I look at you. You are everything that they are._

_Warmth and hope and relentless and explosive and I understand why we gravitate to you because you are stars. _

_And I thought about all of this outside the med ward, and I learned that, through all of the time I spent trying to reach you, I became selfish. Nobody should get to hold all of the stars in the palm of their hand. I made it so that in this world, you would choose me. You would defend me and protect me. You would fall for me._

_I can’t tell you what love is. I’ve seen love in so few ways, but I’ve seen how you love people and that is a love worth earning. I never earned it._

_The same woman who told us to leave came out of the med ward for the first time on the fifth day, and she asked for me. I stood to my feet and I hadn’t stood up for over a hundred hours, but she didn’t wait. I followed her around the corner, out of earshot of Murphy, and she told me she was your mother before she told me anything else. She asked me how we met, how we can call ourselves your family, what I am to you. You must have your father’s eyes because hers were cruel and cold and they made me feel about the size of a grain of rice._

_I didn’t tell her I was in love with you. I still hadn’t told you and I didn’t know if I ever could, but it wasn’t something I could give to her before I gave it to you._

_Your Mom told me Wells and Raven were with you, and that you were alive, but they couldn’t predict if you would stay that way. She said you were unconscious, that it was a miracle your heart was even working. She said it wouldn’t function on its own, and you were hooked up to an oxygen machine, but she still seemed surprised._

_And I asked if I could see you. She was the gatekeeper to that room. She said no and I asked why. I’d been wondering for days whether Murphy was right in the things he said to both of us, but your mother hammered the nails in._

_She told me that I’m not your family, that you couldn’t rely on me to keep you safe, that both you and her would never trust someone like me again with the state I let you get into. It was strange, in the way that she said it; like she was reading it from an encyclopedia, like she had never known what it was like to care. I was a little boy being reprimanded by the principal and she ripped apart my integrity and my loyalty and my upbringing, because she knew who my mother was, and told me that you, if you ever woke up, should get a chance at life without the weight of a man like me- and his sister- to drag you down. She said we, you and me, were a matter of circumstance, and that you were with your family now, and if you had any chance at healing, you would do so best without me._

_I think, in a way, I understand where she was coming from. She was a mother who had lost her child, just to get her back and lose her all over again. And I was an obstacle. I was the one who carried the omen of your casualty, and no man will ever be good enough for a daughter, but to your mother, I certainly wasn’t._

_I didn’t leave you because I wanted to. I didn’t leave you because it was too hard to stay. It was so much harder walking away than it ever would have been to live four months outside that med ward. I didn’t leave you because you were weak or broken; you weren’t either of those things. I left you because you deserved a life without the weight of my selfish love._

_I found Octavia’s room. I went in and held her because she was heartbroken by the loss of our mother, and by the loss of you. I don’t know if she ever told you. No one else knew. She became a little girl again and I became her big brother and it wasn’t until I told her that you might still live that she began to mourn our mom in a healthy way. It was hard for her to do that, but she started eating and sleeping, and I stayed with her._

_I told her about what Murphy and your mom had said and she wanted to strangle them both. She wanted to strangle me for what I was going to do but it was decided. We fought a lot about it. She told me that it would break you to wake up without me there._

_I just couldn’t risk coming back to you only for you to die because I was there. I genuinely thought that might be a possibility. I wanted to give you an easy way out of letting me go._

_Murphy stayed against that wall for three weeks. Every time Dr. Griffin asked someone to take him somewhere else, he’d slink back to that same spot. Eventually they just gave up and let him in, when your mom stopped dropping in so often. I think it was a lot to do with Raven wanting him in there._

_Just, for what it’s worth, I came to see you every night. After they opened the doors to Murphy, I figured they’d become more relaxed about visitors and I’d come in whenever whoever was with you was asleep. I never got too close; I just came to make sure your heart was still beating. I’m selfish and I needed that._

_Me and Octavia joined the Ark first. I started hanging around with Miller because he was cool about me hitting him and he didn’t try to pity me like a lot of them did. Word spread across the whole building who we were, who the people who came all the way from the other side of the continent are. Not everyone knew that I left you, but that sort of information trickled down slowly through the months._

_Echo could tell it was more than just survival for me. She could see I was in love with you and she told me to talk about you to her. It was nice, to get to boast about knowing the person you are. We became friends because she understood why I did what I did, she agreed you deserved a clean slate. Octavia told me that Echo wasn’t into just being friends, even started looking at me like I would ever do that. I would never do that. I hate that you think I would do that._

_You died twice. I won’t go into that. I don’t think I can Clarke._

_When you woke up, the lengths of what I’d done really started to sink in. Raven tracked me down so often, Murphy too but that would always result in a fist fight once his arm was healed, and I’d managed to ignore what they said._

_And then one day she found me in the mess hall and told me you were awake and for the first time in four months I could feel my heart beating again. I actually felt what it was like to breathe in. And all I wanted was to come and find you. All I wanted in the world was to see your eyes and your smile and hear you talk about literally anything, in that one second._

_But I realized I couldn’t because I hadn’t been there for you throughout those four months. They told me during that time, that you needed me and that when you woke up, if I wasn’t there, you’d be heartbroken. I was numb until you were really, properly alive, and then I felt again. And it hurt so much knowing that I left you. I realized in that moment, that I should have stayed and waited like Murphy did. I should have sat by your side and I should have waited until you could talk to me to have this conversation._

_I don’t disagree with your mother, or with Murphy on the things he said. I thought I was looking after you by walking away. I was thinking about your future, but I spent so long thinking about what would happen once you’d woken up that I hadn’t thought about how much I should have been with you while you were comatose._

_You didn’t get the gradual realization that we couldn’t be together that I did. I should have told you and spoken to you and instead I left you to wake up without me there and I hated myself for it. You’d made it through the darkest time without me, and so I realized I didn’t get to be with you now._

_So I told Raven I wasn’t coming, and Wells found me a few hours later._

_We fought. I said a lot that I didn’t really mean. He hit me so hard and I wanted him to do that. I made mistake after mistake after mistake and I wanted you to hate me because I thought that was justice._

_For weeks, I didn’t come to see you because if I came then, it would have been dirty and dishonest and unfair. Four months of radio silence meant I didn’t get to just waltz back into your life. So the radio silence had to carry on._

_When I walked into the mess hall on the day that you got out, you were in a wheelchair, laughing at something Wells said, and I didn’t see you at first because I wasn’t looking. But everyone in the room was paying attention to something at the Ark table and it couldn’t have been anything but you. The immortal girl who fought and fought and fought._

_And Clarke, I hadn’t forgotten how beautiful you are, but it hit me in the face all over again. And I ran from the room because I didn’t know how I was supposed to breathe the same air as you and not be next to you, not have my arm around you, not try my best to make you smile._

_You didn’t look weak or broken. You looked small, sure. You looked like you could use a little more rest, but you were still the warrior you’d been before._

_Echo came to find me and talked me into coming into the mess. She said I didn’t get to make this about me. She respects you more than you know Clarke.  I think she might be jealous of how unavailable you made me, but she still respects what you did more than that. She said it was your time to prove to everyone you were just as much of a fighter as you were, and I didn’t get to run from that._

_And then Murphy tripped me, and I’d been trying so hard, holding my breath so tight, but he made me stumble and then he laughed in my face about how he had you and how I didn’t and the mantra of ‘make her hate you’ was repeating over and over in my head. So I hit him, and you left._

_See, when it’s somebody else doing the hating, it seems cold and clinical and you forget about so much that comes with it. I thought that if you hated me, that meant you would feel absolutely nothing towards me. I was okay with that._

_And then, weeks later, we were standing outside of that hotel and you were about to go into the heart of it and I was so scared of you dying again. But you taunted me with our constellation, the stardust crown and what I’d told you against a school bus. And it reminded me of what love should be, and you made it sound like you were burning._

_I realized hate isn’t the nothing that I thought it could be. I hurt you so, so badly and I will never be able to make up for all the things I did that led to hurting you this much._

_I didn’t want you to hate me anymore, not after I saw how much you were burning, but I was stuck, trapped under all of the loyalty that I made you think I’d lost, and underneath all of the mistakes I’d made._

_Selfishly, I still don’t want you to hate me anymore. But I understand with everything why you do and why you should._

_So this isn’t atonement. This isn’t enough to make amends. This isn’t enough to be an apology. But I will live the rest of my life striving to be the person that you made me believe I could be once upon a time._

_I hope this is enough to help you let me go._

_Yours,_

_Bellamy._

When Clarke finishes, she turns the last page over to look at the other side, expecting something more, needing to know more, but he’s signed his name, underlined it twice.

He’s underlined it twice.

She doesn’t want to let him go. She doesn’t want him to want her to let him go. There isn’t anything on the other side.

Clarke folds all of the pages back over themselves and shoves them into a pocket so that they can only exist in her head. She isn’t sure what Clarke she is anymore, his Clarke, or Murphy’s Clarke, or her mother’s Clarke.

She doesn’t know which one she is, but she knows exactly the one she wants to be.

There’s something noble in this letter. This upfront confession, perhaps the one she’d been afraid of all those months ago in the back of a truck. This refusal to deny any of the things that he screwed up. As far as explanations go, Clarke can’t help but be a bit disappointed about this one. Because, now, she doesn’t want to shout at him, or blame him, or hate him.

She doesn’t want to be angry, not at him. For him, maybe. To feel like you don’t deserve to be in someone’s life, like you aren’t worthy of taking care of someone who you want to take care of, is pain.

She can’t speak for all kinds of pain, but she can speak for hers. Dying was agony, heartbreak was torture, but the heartbreak of the man she knows she could feel so much love for, that’s something else completely.

And it is, it is something else.

He asked her if he could be the moon; he couldn’t possibly know what that means. Of course he’s the moon.

And she will tell him that.

Clarke feels something new, something unknown until tonight. It’s only when she stands, not needing any sort of rest or support apart from the building, the mountain, beneath her feet, that she is able to name it.

If she holds her hand above her head and looks through the ring that her thumb and finger can make when touching tangentially, Clarke can hold the stars between them. She can hold a dozen or so from here, a herd, a troop of them.

When she turns, to the side a little, and tries to catch the moon between that same space, it doesn’t fit. It wouldn’t fit. It’s not the stars that give power, or strength, not from here in this world. It’s the moon. That elusive beacon, pushing tides around their lost planet. That themselves drive the heat and the ships and the channels of star-stuffed ocean.

And that new feeling is peace. She gets an hour, maybe two, of peace up here on a fueling rooftop.

She should go downstairs and shower, or make sure Wells is eating something on his work shift or yell endlessly to her mother about the wrongs she’s done. And all of those things will happen; there’s no way she’s going to let Abby get out of this one. The anger Clarke feels for her mother is surpassing limits she thought she’d never be able to reach again as a teenager.

Maybe Bellamy would have made the same decision, maybe Abby’s words were just the final nails on an already sealed coffin, but that doesn’t make them right in any way. She doesn’t care if she’d been a mother wrapped up in grief; she had no right to say those things to him.

They weren’t words spoken in mourning; they were words spoken in spite. They were lies. They were distortions. They were not born of love or protection; they were born of a toxic obsession to cling to the last of her family.

And he had to stand there, take it, without anyone with him to prove it wrong. He needed her, all along, maybe more than she needed him.

Hurt is still a mystery, but she is not the only one who felt it. So she is not the only one to name it. There’s a peace that comes with the knowledge that Bellamy has named it for her, has driven into ink the remorse that comes with it.

The moon doesn’t fit in her hand. She’d like to show him how none of that matters, not now that she’s got peace.

 

…

 

Perhaps peace doesn’t fit in her hand either. Perhaps Murphy has been right all along in blaming the world for the bad things that have happened to him. Perhaps Clarke, with time, will come to learn that she shouldn’t get her hopes up while things are still hanging in the balance, that she should never really get her hopes up.

Because Clarke wakes up happy. Sheltered from falling by the one foot ledge, she wakes up with her t-shirt darkened a little by the sweat starting to gather along her back, the sun burning down and making her cheeks feel tight.

She squints her eyes, opens her mouth to see how badly she’s burnt her skin, and it’s probably not going to be awful. She’d told Bellamy that she burns under the sun- this isn’t something that’s changed either.

Sleeping on the ground was the norm before; kind of like driving. She won’t forget how to do it anytime soon. The aches in the base of her back are practically a custom now.

Clarke picks herself up, stretches out, and walks awkwardly towards the fire escape to get some rest from the relentless sun. She even takes a second to appreciate the irony of that.

She pads downstairs, not bothering to stop by and yell at her mother. She’s got to yell at Murphy too; she can just take care of them at the same time.

The door to Ark floor is on the next flight of stairs down, and Clarke hovers over to the keypad to type their code in when she notices Raven coming up the stairs towards her, taking them two at a time. She’s got her eyes trained to the ground; nothing seems all too strange. Not until she gets to the top and Clarke smiles, leans on the heavy door with a flourish, and Raven finally spots her.

Raven, a girl who makes a joke out of almost everything, isn’t smiling. Her eyes are patchy, ponytail carrying less hair than the strands that lay fallen out of it, underneath the hair tie, or around her face. She walks towards Clarke, who’s own casual expression drops, with sadness in the footsteps she takes.

There’s no caution about it. Maybe sadness isn’t the right way to describe it, because Raven’s movements and eyes and posture, are hurried to the point of disorder.

“Where the hell have you been?” she snaps, not angrily, more disbelieving, more relieved that Clarke is here. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“What- I- what’s going on?” Clarke gets out, looking in and out of the entryway as though there’s danger right behind her.

“It’s Bellamy,”

Not Blake. It’s Bellamy. Clarke takes her friend in again, just to make sure she’s getting the right message. But Raven, a girl who didn’t even panic when she was dying, looks terrified.

“What happened?” she asks, barely missing a beat, letting the door slam closed as she reaches subconsciously to get downstairs.

“Come on,” Raven says and waves her along before taking off, only a pace or two in front of Clarke.

They storm down together; it takes longer for Clarke’s heart to catch up to them both, because she can feel it lodged in her throat. Raven’s out of breath, she’s clearly been running around the building for too much time.

“Raven, where is he?”

She thinks they’re going to wherever he’s going. Raven’s too hysterical, too all over the place for her to not be getting her to him. Clarke needs to know if she should be getting weapons or a fucking jacket or _something_. She doesn’t know how to panic yet, not until she knows what is actually going on. So she just echoes Raven’s stampede and doesn’t dare let her mind wander.

“Med ward,” she answers, sounding tired and beyond concerned. “They brought him in a half hour ago.”

“Brought him in?” Clarke quietens, partly because she’s lost her breath, partly because her heart is only climbing higher.

“He’s alive,”

It’s not an obvious thing to say. It’s easy to die now. So Clarke gets to rule that out of the long list of possibilities this, whatever it is, could be. But Raven makes it clear that Bellamy being alive is a bonus, and if it’s a plus side that he’s alive, Clarke doesn’t really know what to do.

“What happened?” she repeats, rushing, dragging, all sorts of screwed up as they reach the ground floor and keep running.

“They walked into a death trap, and it turned to shit. I- uh- I don’t know but Murphy can’t, he won’t-”

They reach the floor of the infirmary and Raven gives up on speaking, in favor of taking Clarke’s hand and pulling her across the corridors. Clarke feels like she’s underwater: her ears are blocked, ringing with something high pitched and almost ambient but not enough, and every sound ricochets through her whole body.

She’s breathing underwater, screaming underwater, sinking to the bottom.

Lincoln is pacing back and forth in front of the door to the med ward, one arm across his stomach and the other holding his head up. He always looks pretty focused, but this is another level. Roan’s stood opposite him, both of them talking about something soberly.

When Roan sees the two of them, he pushes away from the wall, hat in hand, already reaching out.

“Roan?” Clarke asks, hoping he hears every question she has simply in his name.

“He’s in there,” he nods, grimacing. Clarke doesn’t stand around to wait for anything else, she just crashes towards those doors, the ones that he broke his fingers against, and when people say crash, they don’t mean crash. Because crashing means damage, or violence, or loud noises, and they very rarely mean any of those things. But Clarke actually crashes into these doors, her knees bruising instantly, both palms flat against the wood, her forehead inches from the surface. “Clarke,” Roan clears his throat, too quiet. “He’s in surgery, you can’t go in yet.”

His voice is on a frequency too calm to be registered, and her hands are useless when they’re just resting flat against the wood. So she hits against it, the faint blistering of the skin of her face throbbing, and she hits against it again.

“Let me in!” she shouts, vulnerability rising the more her heart does. “Let,” she pounds against the door again. “Me, In!”

“Angel-”

“I am _not_ your fucking Angel!”

Clarke turns on her heels, forcing her hands into fists to cool the searing pain, and Roan looks like a cat today. The calculating, manipulative sort of expression.

“Okay,” he says, slowly.

“What happened?”

“The hospital was crawling. They got-”

“Yeah I got that.” she snaps, knowing that each time she breathes in, she’s going to have to breathe back out without the knowledge that he is safe, that he is going to be _alive_. “What happened to _him_? Why is he in surgery?”

“He got shot,” Lincoln leans towards her, apologetic.

“Shot?” Clarke can only mouth it.

“There was a man. No, he wasn’t a man anymore. He had a gun, Clarke,”

“Roan please,” she says, turning to him, desperate. “They’ve got to let me in.”

“Your mother’s with him,” he tells her, moving forward, taking Clarke’s arms in his hands like he knows she can barely hold herself up. He says it like that’s going to be of some comfort; it has the opposite effect.

“No.” Clarke pushes back towards the door, punches it and expects it to at least shift on its hinges, but it doesn’t. “She’ll kill him.”

She doesn’t care if that hardly makes sense to anyone else. Nothing makes sense right now.

“Clarke don’t be-”

“Octavia’s with him,” Lincoln says, an attempt at reassurance. “He’s not alone.”

“Please,”

She can’t figure out if it’s because she needs this, or because Bellamy does, but that doesn’t matter. There’s just no way she can be outside while he is in there, fatally injured.

“Listen,” Lincoln puts one of his hands to Clarke’s back, not impatient, completely, weirdly patient. “The bullet hit his waist. They’ve got to stop the bleeding and make sure nothing vital has been-”

“I _know_ how to treat a gunshot wound,”

She wants to shrug him off but can’t bring herself to do it. He’s only trying to help, to comfort her; it’s not his fault he has no idea how to do it.

She hits the door again, looks to see her index finger turning blue and gets distracted by the rising noises on the other side of this wall, this fortress, pushing her ear up against it. Clarke almost falls when the door disappears, tipping in slow motion before she regains her balance and stumbles forward a few inches to retain it.

“Clarke?” Murphy asks, not surprised. Of course he’s not surprised.

“Murphy?”

She has to take a moment, just to remember what’s going on, what’s just happened. And then she’s jumping into him and throwing her arms around his neck to tug him into her. “You’re okay,” she whispers, because her breath is starting to give up on her. “God, you’re okay.”

He loops his fingers around her back, pressing her into him just as fervently, in a way that tells her it’s okay to need him right now. In a way that he’ll never voice.

“It was meant for me,” he rushes, nails digging into her still-damp t-shirt, knowing there’s so few seconds in between now and too late. “He was trying to shoot for me. Bellamy he-”

She opens her eyes, intending to push away and span the room for him, but his bed is the first one she sets upon. She can’t see him, not from all the way over here, there are too many people around him for that.

She can make out Octavia’s dead straight hair in the chair next to a shoddy bedside table, Wells’ rigid posture as he focuses on whatever’s in front of him. Clarke can see the purse of her mother’s lips, the gentle hands of a woman whose son holds LEGO like butterflies in a jar.

“Oh my God,” she gasps, and it’s a good thing that Murphy’s got his arms around her, because he takes her weight completely when she starts to drop.

Bellamy’s hair looks like midnight from here, silky midnight, dusted in places with dirt. Clarke scrapes her shoes against the slippery floor, has to push a few times to gather the strength to get to him. Murphy’s hand follows her arm just in case she needs it, but Clarke just needs to reach Bellamy, and his sister, who doesn’t look like the light girl she used to know.

His face is a milky shade of white: so un-Bellamy that the paleness looks even more dangerous on his skin. His eyes are hooded over, not tense, completely and utterly unfeeling. Too un-Bellamy.

The three medics working on him are at the center of his body, craning over it as though they’re digging for treasure, and there’s blood on sheets that Clarke had thought only existed in death.

She must whimper or make some sort of sound. Something must alert her mother to her presence, because Abby doesn’t even look up before she’s talking to Wells, her mouth shielded by a blue face mask, her words still cutting.

“Get her out of here,” she says to him, even though his hands are swamped in white gloves painted red.

Wells turns, sees the tears shredding their way down Clarke’s face, and stands strong.

“I’m not leaving,”

Octavia stands to her feet at the white noise of Clarke’s voice, pushes back the chair that had been spaced feet away from Bellamy’s head, and her eyes are a rosy color. They look more dry than they do wet; still naked though.

Abby hands something to Dr. Tsing, takes her time in removing her gloves and pushing the mask down from her face, as though there isn’t a man dying on her operating table.

“Clarke,” Abby says, starting to make her way around the blockade that is Wells, pacing towards her with intention. “Honey,”

“No!” Clarke bursts, unsure of what to do with her hands, unsure of where to look but at Bellamy, unsure of what to feel but fear strong enough to melt a world’s worth of zombies. “Don’t you dare. I am not going to let you do to him what you did to me.”

She’s not going to be pushed away from him. She isn’t going to let him wake up feeling like she’d be anywhere else but here. If he wakes up. God, if he wakes up.

Her mother looks her dead in the eyes and a tidal wave washes over them both. Abby squints, to rid herself of the salt and the scum it brings with it. The understanding that Clarke knows what she did, settling without the time to settle.

“Wells,” she snaps, moving back like her daughter isn’t here. Good. “Take her out.”

Not good.

He stays focused on whatever he’s doing to keep Bellamy alive when he speaks.

“No, Abby,”

“You’ll follow the orders of you commander,”

“You sent him away when it was Clarke and it broke them both. I’m not going to watch that happen again.”

And Clarke wants to thank him, tell him she loves him for that, but she can’t risk distracting him, and besides, she gets practically attacked by a shaky brunette.

Octavia holds Clarke’s neck between her elbows like she’s getting ready to break it, and she probably could right now, if she wanted to. Clarke can’t see her, her face pressed into the corner of her greyed shirt but feels her sobbing gently. Not like Clarke has been: not all manic and chaotic.

“He won’t die,” Octavia whispers, burying herself deeper into Clarke’s shoulder.

“He can’t,” Clarke answers, resting her temple on to Octavia’s head and setting her misty gaze on to his form, his sleeping, hardened form. There’s nowhere for them to go where they won’t be in the way, so they stay holding each other at the foot of the bed, at the tips of his toes, and he is still breathing.

She can still see his chest rising and falling, perhaps shallowly, but he’s still breathing. So Clarke keeps breathing, and her head starts to clear over the time it takes the medics to stop the blood flow from the wound, to assure the bullet skimmed his stomach but didn’t so much as take a nick at it. To stitch the hole in his chest, to go about every other routine procedure, which follows through hours.

She’s never doubted her mother’s medical ability. The woman was chief of the central hospital to a whole city for decades. The number of bullet wounds she’s had to treat, especially coming from a town like theirs, has been inconceivable. That is not what sparked irrationality in Clarke.

Once she’s heard Tsing confirm that the bullet hasn’t caused any internal bleeding, that it won’t be fatal, at least firsthand, Clarke’s spine deflates, and the seconds feel more like seconds. He’s still passed out, probably a mixture of the blood loss and the pain, but they are competent physicians, and they are healing him.

This would never have been permitted in the time before; to watch a family member go through surgery like this. They’re in a communal infirmary though; it’s not like privacy is completely attainable.

Bellamy’s face doesn’t gain any color over the day that they wait for him to wake up. When Abby is secure in the stability of his heartrate, in the promise of her stitches, she vanishes. She doesn’t say anything to Clarke, something she can’t attempt to regard.

They’ve got a chair either side of his bed by the time Raven is bringing them some food for dinner. Neither of them touch the trays.

Octavia Blake crying is something she’d supposed she’d never have to see, never get to see, and Clarke regrets ever wondering what it might be like. It is disappointing. She doesn’t shake or convulse or do anything other than cry. And every time it happens, Clarke reaches an arm forward, careful not to so much as touch his body, and takes one of Octavia’s hands in hers until she stops again.

“He’s just my rock, you know?” Octavia sniffles once Tsing has finished checking him over for the tenth time today, at least every hour, and has moved away to busy herself with something else at the other end of the room.

People have been dropping in throughout the day, sometimes kids who need a bandaid, sometimes more serious things, but there’s no one staying the night in here. She’s been good in knowing who to let inside, when to send them away.

Clarke doesn’t register them. She will tomorrow, but Bellamy hasn’t woken up and she can’t think about anything else. He doesn’t move either, which makes him look like he’s not sleeping. When they’d camp out, he’d put his arms out in front of his body like he was reaching for something in his sleep. Now his arms are limp by his sides, and it only makes this worse.

Raven offered to go and get Lincoln when she dropped their food by, not making it obvious that he was already waiting right outside even though Clarke knew. Octavia shrugged her off, thanked her but didn’t look up, and Raven creeped away to give the two of them some space.

Clarke nods.

“It’s just, people leave. Everyone always leaves, but he wasn’t meant to. He’s my big brother. I’m not supposed to see him die,”

The lights are low in here, lamps and candles lit in the places that they’re needed. Not around the empty beds, but around the end of the hall where the supplies are kept, where the sitting area for the medics has been left barren, where nobody else really needs to head towards. And around Bellamy, emanating light into the rest of this useless space.

The forty empty beds are unnecessary; the hundreds living here aren’t getting into situations that require an overnight stay in the hospital. Maybe one or two might need to occasionally, but this outskirt is simply for the Ark.

And Bellamy feels like a weaning lighthouse, shirtless with candy wrapped bandages belted around his waist.

Clarke opens her mouth to speak but her throat is scratchy and her voice croaks.

Octavia takes sympathy and keeps talking so she doesn’t have to.

“This won’t kill him, I just… you ever look at someone and think, shit happens, life happens, when the world turns into Armageddon you will be here. You will be here and everyone else will leave, but not you.”

Clarke thinks of someone, patchy brown beard and absurd hatred of sour patch kids. She doesn’t want to say it out loud, thinks it might be weird to say she feels that way about Murphy. So she nods again.

Octavia growls from the back of her throat and slumps towards Bellamy, and Clarke by default. Her elbows come up to lean on the edge of his mattress, fists holding her head up.

“He got me through Mom. Not Lincoln, not any of them. _Bellamy_ got me through it. I lied to you before… I felt guilty because you don’t know what he-”

“I know,”

She doesn’t even look surprised. Clarke is too scared to lean forward like that.

“And I was too busy fucking grieving to look after him like he looked after me. Like what the fuck actually is that?”

“I-” Clarke stammers, not sure if it’s a rhetorical question or if she’s actually expected to answer.

“And he’s the one who gets shot? Who even gets shot? This is just pain. He’s not even going to die from this; this is just pain,”

She looks down to his face, lifted by marshmallow, without a single crease in his forehead. Clarke doesn’t know how to process anything right now, so this feels strange. He’s been hurt so badly, but he doesn’t look like he’s hurting.

“And you know what? This, right here, this is what matters. What good is Russia going to be to us now? Who cares about fucking Russia? If people like Bellamy aren’t getting their shot at life, real life, what is the point?”

Clarke moves to pull her sleeve over her wrist before she realizes she’s not wearing a jacket. This room is unfairly drafty, considering they’re underground in the middle of July. It is cold.

So she settles for wiping away the stray tear resting on her cheekbone with the back of her hand.

“He is good. Why doesn’t good get good? Who actually fucking gets good if he doesn’t? Where is it, Clarke?”

“I don’t know anymore,” she answers, because Octavia is voicing everything that Clarke can’t even begin to think. Bellamy doesn’t look like he’s in pain, but is that not him? Bellamy hides his pain until it is ready to become someone else’s. And hell, if he’ll ever give it to anyone else.

They’ve connected him to a heart monitor, sure it’s monitoring other things too, important things too, but she can hear his heartbeat without having to watch it.  His heartbeat is making the same sounds hers did when she was in one of these beds. There are the same neon lights shining off of his pasty skin as hers. She wishes she could say things like that, and know what they actually mean, know how to know what feeling things like that is.

But Clarke feels her ribcage on top of her hips, scattered into crumbs and dust. She can feel the shells of her shoulders getting ready to break away. Her neck and her jaw aren’t a neck and a jaw, right? Are they?

“Should I leave?” she thinks, for the first time today. It was a given before this. It was Clarke needing to get to Bellamy, needing to see him breathing, needing to make sure today wasn’t the last day for him, needing to know that he wouldn’t die with the belief that she hates him. But his sister has watched her world go down today, sat on the setting world’s bedside, who is she to stand on the side-lines of that?

“No,”

“Okay,”

Octavia holds the heels of her palms to both eyes, not dabbing, just pressing, looking up to the ceiling as though she’s trying to stop her mascara from running, as though she’d even be wearing mascara.

“This is a bump,” she breathes, heavily, voice rainy. Then she laughs without humor, almost tired, and just relieved. “God, I don’t want him to see me cry. You spend so long trying to convince someone not to treat you like their kid sister, then I go and pull the tantrum card.”

“Maybe…” Clarke starts, and waits before Octavia can pull her eyes away from the roof of the underground to carry on speaking. “Maybe it’s good to be his kid sister, sometimes. Maybe you need to be his kid sister just as much as he needs to be your big brother.”

And it’s something she’d never considered until she’s said it, but it’s true. He has lived his life being Octavia’s big brother, yearning for the role, while she resented hers. They are what they are to each other, and it’s something both of them need regardless of their own prides.

“Maybe,” Octavia says, reaching for Bellamy’s arm and holding on to it. Holding on to it, to tell him that she’s here for him, that she will be here for him when he wakes up no matter what, that she loves him across a bond that only stems from years of reliance, and survival, and trust. From selflessness.

Clarke turns her face away, across to his virtual heart. There’s an emerald green horizon across the interface, peaking into mountain tips the curve and uncoil and repeat. That line seems infinite.

This isn’t her moment. At all. She wouldn’t want it if it were.

But she’s going to stay for the mountain tip that wakes him up, and she’s going to be here for the one where he starts to feel the pain of a bullet wound, and the one that holds his next toothy smile, and his inevitable lack of shame for doing this.

She’ll be here. Because he came home. Now it’s time for Clarke to do the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Shall I stay, would it be a sin?'  
> \- Can't Help Falling in Love, Elvis Presley
> 
> Big thank you to Iva- your edit was the first I've seen of this fic, and it was so beautiful. I didn't realise it was a quote from here until I watched it through for the third time lol.   
> Also, again, thank you to all the people who have privately messaged me to tell me what they think. You're all amazing for putting up with the slow updates.


	38. These days of dust

Raven comes back again within the next couple of hours, after Octavia has fallen asleep on her brother’s arm, and a few of the candles at the far end of the room have been blown out.

She opens the overpowering doors up with her back, both hands preoccupied with balancing four or five blankets that are folded to rise higher than her head. She walks over to them, boots clicking loudly along the aisle between the two rows of beds.

She places the stack at the foot of Bellamy’s bed, takes one off the top and walks around to wrap it over Octavia’s shoulders, scrunching it into her collar so that it stays where it is. Clarke glances up from her lap to let her friend know that she doesn’t need one, but she is startled by the shadows under Raven’s eyes, the sullenness of her skin.

Clarke follows her movements, mouth open to say something, but no words ready. It must be at least three in the morning, probably later. Raven pulls a box out of her pocket, paces towards Bellamy’s bedside, and the material of her pants rubs together too harshly in her strides. She snatches a candle that has been blown out by the draft down here and strikes a match against the side of the box.

Her fingers are too shaky; she snaps the match on the fourth unsuccessful attempt.

“Here,” Clarke snaps, holding her empty hand out flat. Raven wheezes when she drops them heavily into Clarke’s palm, then she tears away from his side, down to the end of the bed again, like she can’t stand to be near him.

“How’s he doing?” she asks tersely after rocking on her heels, arms strapped around her chest, for some time.

The detail on the back of this chair digs into Clarke’s back in strange places. She shifts.

“He’ll be okay,” she hopes. “Mom’s good.”

Her voice is low and not as sad as she feels deep in somewhere. She sounds pretty dead.

“Your _mom_ just asked me to ‘talk some sense’ into you,”

“She what?”

“Leave it,” she shakes her head shallowly. “Another time.”

Another time. Maybe a time, maybe in a week or two when they’re not rattling and tripping from this. Maybe a time, maybe when Clarke can bend her knees and remember what it’s like to walk. When she can hold something in her hand and not want to crumble it in her fist. When she can go to sleep. When she can just be afraid of her dreams, of things that happen only inside her head.

“How much have you slept?” Clarke asks, rubbing her fingers over her head to ease the pressure building for the fiftieth time.

Raven takes a seat at the corner of the bed, barely on the mattress, scared to get too close.

“Murphy’s outside,” she sighs back, playing with looped fingers around her wrist. “He wants to know if you need anything.”

“Not really,” not in the literal sense, anyway.

Octavia stirs a bit, breathes in deeply through her nose as she adjusts which side of her face is resting on his arm.

Bellamy still hasn’t moved at all. Maybe that’s not awful for right now. Maybe stillness is a mercy, because a hole has been torn through his skin, and impact has been made against his body that he didn’t deserve. It’s another brick, another weight, another thing to push him down into the ground. Another thing that will make him have to fight.

“Every time,” Raven scoffs, stomping her foot too loudly against the floor, tightening the grip of her wrist. “Every damn time we get a little closer.”

Clarke feels miles away from him. She wants to hold on to him, to tell him in his state of unconsciousness that he’ll be okay. It will take recovery time, lots of it, days spent out of action, and there’s the risk of infection. But Monty and Jasper’s first drafts of moonshine have proved to be something when they’re given another name, and if they were able to cure Clarke’s blood poisoning, then she trusts the sterility that they can give to him.

Being shot is not the worst danger in the world. Regardless of seeing Bellamy shot being the worst feeling in the world.

And it is.

“We spent so long hating him. He’s still our family, Clarke. I’m not ready to lose him either,”

“We can’t,”

“I know,”

Clarke pinches the bridge of her nose, squints her eyes shut to keep everything under control.

“Raven, if the people I am supposed to trust tell him, ever again, that he is not good enough… He was supposed to trust you two. You were meant to be there for each other. Where were you doing this for him when it was me in this position? You hated him because he left me, well you both left him, before he walked away, and he was still out there saving Murphy’s life. He doesn’t hate either one of you and you saw it too late. Tell Murphy I don’t need anything from him.”

Raven bites her lip and rubs her sleeve against the side of her face, breathing in wetly.

“Clarke, I’m sorry,”

“I know. But if he died from this, if this hit him an inch higher from where it did, he’d never know that. If he’s still our family, you’re going to look him in the eye and tell him that yourself,”

“Okay,”

“Okay,”

Clarke watches the spare hand at his side, how it is open and waiting. She can’t bring herself to take it, knows it’s not hers anymore. She knows he hasn’t given her his hand; he’d never ask for her to have it now.

“You should sleep,” Raven says, resisting a yawn. She looks just as bad as Octavia does, and Clarke can’t bring herself to regret taking the dig at her. It’s called delegation.

She’s just as mad at herself, for letting him go without asking him to take care of himself, without telling him what he means to her.

“I’ll sleep when Bellamy wakes up,”

And he will. But there’s no way she’s closing her eyes until she knows he’s not in so much pain that he’s had to pass out from it.

She expects Raven to fight her on this, but she doesn’t. There is nothing to fight. Some things are uncertain. Some things don’t have any wrong or right answers. This isn’t one of those things; this is one of the inevitabilities, and nothing is going to change her decision.

Raven slips out after sitting with her some more. Clarke’s watch buzzes that it’s four in the morning, lets her know that it’s time for her watch shift, but this is another one of those inevitabilities, and she doesn’t argue against Raven when she insists on covering the shift. She won’t let Clarke leave just as much as Clarke won’t let herself leave.

She doesn’t ask if Murphy is going to stay outside, she’s fine with waiting for him to grow up and come in on his own.

Octavia scoots her chair forward in her sleep, both hands coming to grip to Bellamy’s arm. Clarke keeps fidgeting in her uncomfortable seat, staring into the dark parts of the room and tapping out the sounds of his heartbeat on to her watch.

 

…

 

Bellamy stirs a few hours later, and Clarke practically jumps out of her chair, hands coming to the side of it just to make sure she doesn’t fall over. He doesn’t wake up, he’s still sleeping, but Clarke startles when she sees the pain start to manipulate the edges of his face and she has no idea what to do.

His heart rate starts to go up, mountains trying to collide with each other, and his chest jolts a little to get some more air. His face pinches together, cheeks rising, eyebrows almost meeting, and he looks so young in his pain.

Clarke watches for a moment, nails digging into her lip to stop from making a sound, to stop from crying out. Sweat is already gathering on his hairline, distinct drops starting to roll down his forehead. No matter how much she knows she should just sit back and respect his space, Clarke can’t just stay away knowing he’s in agony.

His sister doesn’t look like she’s offering any relief, a weight on his hand, because she is his little sister and she needed her own comfort too. Clarke doesn’t want to need it, wants to give Bellamy however much comfort he needs.

She pulls her chair closer to his head, moving up from where she’d been at his hips, and she has to lean on to the mattress to reach him. Clarke promises herself that she’ll cut his hair for him when he wakes up, because this is getting ridiculous now. The curls that fall over his forehead get pushed back by her shaky fingers, featherlight against his damp skin so as not to disturb too much.

His mouth opens a little, like the pain is looking for an outlet, so Clarke doesn’t stop after doing it once, just for the small chance that this is helping him. She pushes her fingers along his scalp, and lets them rest on his cheekbone, running along his jawline so sharp she could cut them.

She waits for his breathing to level out again, to stop being so ragged, as he turns his face into her hand, nuzzling against it like a puppy with its leg bandaged up.

“It’s okay,” she hums, as quietly as she dares. “It’s okay.”

And of course he doesn’t say anything back, because he’s fast asleep, and he can’t hear her. It’s fine, when he can hear it, she’ll just say it again, and again, and again.

However many times he needs to hear it, she’ll say it again.

He fidgets a little under the thin blanket, shoving it down until it exposes his neck, his bare shoulders, his chest, his easing heart.

There’s candlelight all around him, flickering, threatening to blow out but staying because it is wanted. Clarke’s vision is blurry as she looks at him, thinking this looks like a scene out of a movie, stroking her thumb over his eyebrow repeatedly.

“I’m staying,” she whispers, solid in the fact that he isn’t listening.

His head moves some more. He’s not nodding, not responding. She’s still going to stay.

 

…

 

“Tsing said he should wake up by the end of the day,” Octavia tells Lincoln the next day, both of her hands in both of his.

Clarke feels grossly like a third wheel, keeps her eyes on the corner of Bellamy’s blanket to give them some privacy. She’s offered to go and find something to do twice, but the both of them have shut her up before she could even finish the thought.

Lincoln nods. “That’s good,”

“I think he got pretty lucky. That’s what they said,”

“Babe, I’ve never seen anything like it. That guy was seriously wrong,”

Clarke looks down to Bellamy’s pale face, wonders if he would have ever called her Babe, wonders if she would have liked it if he did, if she would have returned the nickname. She mouths it to herself, babe, babe, and can’t quite figure it out.

“What actually happened?” she asks, knowing she won’t be able to stomach hearing it from Bellamy’s words, or Murphy’s.

“He was hiding in the corner of the dining hall, behind the door. We ran inside because there weren’t that many walkers in there and the rest of the place was pretty swamped. He was so screwed up, was completely covered in his own vomit and blood, and he had this open wound in his stomach where something had taken a bite out of it. He was laughing when he saw us. He had a knife in one of his hands- I think he’d taken it to his own mouth. His lips were cut so deeply, like he was trying to widen his smile even more. I don’t know, man.”

Clarke grimaces and Octavia tightens her grip on her boyfriend.

“We were trying to think of a way to get out of there. Nyko went over to the guy to see if he could be helped, but if he wasn’t already a walker then he was going to be within a few hours. He couldn’t speak English anyway, or any language. He was just laughing and growling. Murphy was being Murphy, and the guy didn’t really appreciate that. So he pulled out a gun, and they both fired at the same time, but Bellamy was just… there. Shoved him so hard that he fell over, then when the bullet hit him he fell on top of Murphy.”

“How did you get out?”

“Nyko and I carried him. I got him over my shoulder while he worked around the wound. The rest of ‘em just kept shooting I guess. We lost Sterling.”

He adds the last part as though it’s an afterthought, but Clarke snaps her head up and sees the guilt on his face. She doesn’t really know what to say. She knows this job comes with the risk, Bellamy’s injury is enough of an example of that, and she never really tried to get to know Sterling in such a way that she would have any right to mourn him. Lincoln did though, and he’s lost a friend.

Octavia leans her head on to Lincoln’s neck, eyes softly closed.

He’s the first member of the Ark she’s known to die. While there is no hole in her heart, there’s sure to be one in her day-to-day.

“Thank you for getting him out,” is what she goes for in the end, hoping he can see the good he did in spite of his loss.

“Well, he’s practically family now,” Lincoln says, looking to Octavia bashfully.

“Please,” Octavia snorts gently. “You would have done it for anyone.”

“Still,”

“Others would have left him for dead,” Clarke says, pinching the knuckle of her thumb.

“Clarke you should know, he said something before he passed out,”

“I don’t want to hear it,”

“You don’t?”

“He’s going to wake up. He can tell me himself,”

 

…

 

At some point, when it’s just the three of them again, Bellamy starts losing control of his breath. It’s like a nightmare, but not.

“Get a doctor,” Octavia says, maintaining a calm in her voice that is surprising but not unwelcome.

“There’s nothing they could do,” Clarke shakes her head. “They’ve just given him the strongest pain killers they have.”

“Well he needs something,”

He’s pushing his head back into his pillow, his whole body tense, straining everywhere to try to get the hurt to spread out. Clarke remembers the way he calmed when she sang to Charlotte, and the way it made her happy to sing to herself while she was dying, while she was in so much pain.

She’s scared to touch Bellamy in front of his sister, in case it’s something she has no right to do around his blood family, but Clarke supposes this is just as much about Octavia as it is about her. It’s about Bellamy, and how he needs some relief.

He’s got his lips parted, his teeth biting together, forcing his jaw into a pivot so tight. Clarke stands to her feet and dithers only for a moment before perching lightly on the very edge of the mattress. She can feel Octavia watching her as she moves, as she leans forward and moves her thumb back to where it was last night. She takes his hair from his eyes, runs her fingers over them too to stop him from squeezing them so firmly shut.

She’s always liked it when people would caress her closed eyes, found it calming as a kid. He’s still struggling, and she can’t see him pass out like he’d been again. He was so lifeless yesterday, so pale and still.

She reaches another hand out, cups it around his jaw and his neck and his ear, as many places as she can reach, and she moves him higher up on his pillows, more comfortable.

Clarke blinks slowly, wants to suck away his pain as she tries to block out every other sense. She used this song when Raven became so grossly dehydrated, when Octavia fell ill, when she was dying, when Charlotte was changing. It’s a soothing, warming song. It was the one her father would sing when she had the flu, or when she would want to stay awake all night and drink hot cocoa with those little mini marshmallows, toasted by his blow torch.

It’s the song that made Clarke feel safe before she knew what safety meant. It’s the song that let her know that she had people who would look after her, put her first, who would try to be in her life for as long as they could.

And Bellamy needs that kind of security now, so Clarke puts her pride on hold, and she sings soft words for him, her fingers tracing his face in every place that looks like suffering. She sings quietly, because if she gets any louder then her voice will break and shatter into whimpers.

He liked it when she sang for the both of them before. It’s a different song, an actual lullaby this time. Not a love song, not one about romance or rocky emotion, it is a lullaby. The kind you really do sing to someone to promise peace.

Because love can wait for them when they’re both awake and alive enough to confess it, but peace is a drop of gold in this hellish ocean.

“That’s it Bell,” Octavia whispers, out of Clarke’s sight, when he starts to settle. It’s slow moving. She might sing the song two or three times before he even begins to calm down, still she can feel his pulse under his jaw and uses its slowing as confirmation that it is working. “That’s it.”

Her voice goes patchy and silent at the highest parts, she can’t really follow a strict timing, and there definitely isn’t a distinct key to it. Bellamy doesn’t seem to mind that. Octavia lights another candle when he is tranquil, as though they are becoming surrounded in sunset again. It’s the evening; it’s probably time for sunset.

Clarke is about to move away from his body, to give him space now that she’s not needed, when one of the baby flames of the nearby candles catches something rolling down the side of his face. His tear disappears into his shadowed hair, an amber glow from within it getting diminished.

She’s leaning far enough into him that, if she could see her own breath, the cloud would reach him before dispersing into the air. If he’s crying, she needs to be closer. So Clarke braces one of her hands on his pillow, thumb still skimming the edge of his neck, and leans forward some more.

She runs her tongue over her bottom lip, partly out of self-consciousness, partly out of nervousness. Then she lets her pursed mouth touch lightly to the place where light caught his tear, and again a little further up, to the corner of his eye, lingering and gentle.

Once she’s kissed him, it’s almost impossible to not keep doing it. Because the tension in his face has seeped away, and he has become soft again. And she can’t stand to see him cry.

Clarke’s nose brushes his temple as she musters the will to move away from him. Nothing in her wants to do it, but he is supposed to be healing, to be breathing, and she doesn’t want to crowd around him if she’s not sure it’s what he would want.

Clarke climbs down slowly from his bunk and takes her seat, moving it towards her instead of moving her towards it.

“I’ve heard that before,” Octavia says, even smaller than last time.

“From me,”

“In the cottage,”

“Yeah,”

Clarke moves her hand down, trails it along the muscle of his arm, lets it fall to his hand. It doesn’t move under hers, so Clarke doesn’t move hers either.

“He’s supposed to be awake,” Octavia sighs, still soft.

“Let him rest. It won’t do him any harm,”

Abby hasn’t come here since Bellamy was first brought in, which would be strange even if it weren’t a patient she’d seen Clarke react so strongly toward. She usually has a shift in the hospital at least every other day, usually more.

She isn’t the woman Clarke hoped she could be in this new world. She’s still someone who forgets things that are supposed to matter and when they are supposed to matter. She’s a good doctor, might be a good leader if Clarke ever had the chance to see it, but she is not a mother. Not in the sense that is important.

Each and every opportunity she’s had to step up, she has wasted. Clarke is done waiting for a woman that doesn’t exist.

The last person Clarke expects to walk through those doors is Echo. Really, she hasn’t crossed her mind since their shared watch shifts. But in she walks, just as Octavia is starting to fall asleep surrounded by the layers she’s wrapped around herself. She’s just as alert as ever when she notices Echo, eyes narrowed in anticipation of what she wants.

She walks like she’s wearing heels, even though she’s definitely not.

“What is it?” Octavia asks when she reaches the three of them.

Clarke is suddenly vividly aware of her hand on top of Bellamy’s, but to take it away now would be strange for everyone involved.

“Nobody told me,” Echo practically growls, her expression giving nothing away, eyes focused only on him.

For the hundredth time, Clarke feels like she shouldn’t be here, like she’s invading on something. She isn’t going to offer to leave now.

“He’s going to wake up,” Octavia says, glancing briefly to Clarke, the corners of her lips turning up when she sees their hands linked together.

“Then I’ll wait until he does,”

Neither of them can tell her not to, not after what happened to him when it was Clarke in one of these beds. She refuses to become her mother. But Echo’s presence brings a need for more candles, more blankets, more protection from a draft arising from nowhere. Echo brings a coldness that Bellamy shouldn’t really have to deal with right now.

Octavia makes eye contact with her, asking the same question that Clarke is asking herself. She clamps her lips together and rubs her thumb against the back of Bellamy’s hand, to let him know she’s still here.

“Why?” Octavia asks, smiling politely but not warmly. Clarke can tell she’s got an angle to spin, a way to get rid of Echo without telling her to leave. She preoccupies herself with grabbing an unused blanket and throwing it over her shoulders, hunching slightly more over his bedside to keep his exposed arm warm too.

“Why what?”

“Why would you stay?”

Echo opens her mouth to answer but comes up empty. It’s a valid question, after all.

“We’re here to make sure he gets better, that he’s okay. If that’s your reason too, then stay,”

Clarke meets Echo’s eyes and sees a venom to them that she’s been keeping at bay recently. Echo looks pointedly to Bellamy, soaking up his hardened shoulders and naked chest, the edges of his bandages just making an appearance beneath the start of the blanket.

“Clarke, why don’t we go and speak privately?” she suggests, falsity lining her voice. The question itself is enough to make Clarke’s eyebrows flash to her hairline and she falters in her answer. It’s obvious though; there’s not a thing she wants to hear from Echo that Octavia wouldn’t want to hear too. Even if there were, she’s not going to leave Bellamy now.

“No,” she answers, shaking her head politely and looking away. Giving the bare minimum at civility.

“If you’re here to stake your claim, you should leave,” Octavia says, sympathetically to Echo, ringing in maturity. Clarke sneaks a glance over to her, sees the restraint in her features. “My brother’s casualty won’t be made into a pissing match for a love triangle that doesn’t exist.”

Ouch.

“So the dead girl gets to stay because of what? Because she got there first?” Echo snaps, already giving up on the niceness that doesn’t exist either. Clarke hates being the dead girl, so she respects Echo’s use of it as an insult. If she’s the dead girl then so be it. It’ll just be her job to prove she can be more.

“Because she is family,” Octavia shrugs, as though it’s the easiest answer possible. “And the love of his life.”

Echo chokes down a laugh, obnoxious and condescending, before she’s turning on her imaginary heels and stalking out of the room. Clarke is surprised to see the candles still alight in the wake of her exit.

Octavia seems pretty happy to fall asleep after that, but Clarke stays up once they’ve blown out the candles together, her left hand in his left, her wrist in the flat of his palm and her fingers seeking out his pulse even though her watch is already counting up the seconds according to it.

 

…

 

The first thing Clarke thinks as she wakes up, is she shouldn’t be waking up. The last couple of days, couple of weeks flood back through her within seconds, and she remembers needing to stay awake. So she’s annoyed that she’s even having to wake up in the first place, because she shouldn’t have been asleep.

Then she remembers holding on to his pulse, his warming skin a safety rail, and reasons it would have been impossible not to fall into it. But his pulse isn’t under the pads of her fingers anymore, none of his hand is. The only bit of Bellamy’s hand that Clarke can feel is his pinky finger wrapped tightly around hers.

The object supporting her head isn’t the cushion that she thought it might be, it’s definitely his leg, the corner of his thigh that leads to his hip, and Clarke sits up straight so quickly that she jolts her neck and winces from it immediately.

Octavia is already awake, slumped with her back against Bellamy’s bedside table, ignoring the backrest that her chair provides, her feet on the end of his mattress away from his.

“He wake up?” Clarke asks, scrubbing at her eyes, pushing his hair back out of his face out of habit.

“Nope,” she answers, stretching out to the ceiling. “Roan and Miller dropped in. They’ve taken our shifts and he’s postponed any trips out for a while.”

“And in Roan terms, that means a couple of days?”

“About that, yeah.”

Clarke hums.

“Wells came too,”

“Jeez how long was I out for?”

“Not sure,” Octavia shrugs. She checks her watch; it’s around midday. “He brought us breakfast. He thinks it’s normal for Bellamy to take a bit longer. Says he could use the recovery time anyway, after everything. I guess two days isn’t a lot to him…”

Bellamy has got Clarke’s pinky locked in his, folded together like rings on a necklace, and he’s still sleeping soundly.

“Wells says the wound is clean. He doesn’t think it’ll get infected if they keep doing what they’re doing,”

“Any sign of Murphy?” she asks, debating whether eating breakfast is worth taking her hand out of his. It’s not.

“No,”

Clarke nods, understanding. She’s sure he’ll be here soon. Murphy knows what happens when someone does this the wrong way, so he won’t disappear. This will be a hit on his pride, being saved by a man he claimed is dead to him, and that’ll take time to face. In here, this isn’t about him either.

“He had a nightmare,” Octavia says, nodding her head at his finger around hers. “Wouldn’t let you go.”

“I don’t mind,”

He seems calm now, not a trace of a nightmare surrounding him. She won’t take responsibility for giving him ease, but if there’s a chance it’s her presence that is helping, there’s not a doubt in her mind about whether or not she’s give him her hand to hold. She already promised him everything. She wouldn’t break it.

Clarke hides a smile behind her other hand, can’t help but think about how this is how she’d make promises back in elementary school.

“You don’t, do you?”

She supposes she’s being asked something made more important than it sounds. Still,

“No,”

Clarke knows what Octavia’s thinking; she can read it in the wistful expression on her face, in the way that she looks at her brother like he’s holding the key to something, like she’s proud and jealous of him all at once. Or because she feels bad for him. She can see that Bellamy won’t be able to hide the guilt when he realizes that Clarke has stayed with him, and Clarke hasn’t even considered that until his grip becomes more responsive.

“Sorry,” Clarke shrugs- maybe it’s necessary.

Octavia snorts back but doesn’t say anything more, still thinking, still considering the two of them in the way that she does.

“Right I’ll plug his nose, you hold him down. This is beyond dull,” she snaps after a while.

Clarke’s too busy smiling at Octavia’s comment to notice much else. She grins, breathes heavily and quickly through her nose, and manages to fathom a comeback that gets lost on her tongue when she sees Bellamy. If he were doing anything else, Clarke wouldn’t think anything of it. But he’s got his eyes closed so softly that he’s still having to blink from the light above them. And the corners of his lips are turned up in that Cheshire cat kind of smile.

Octavia punches him in the shoulder, her way of checking to see if he’s conscious or if he’s just having a good dream. The sound that erupts from his lips is confirmation enough; Bellamy hisses through his shining teeth and jerks away from her upon reflex.

It pulls him closer to Clarke, who can only stare down at him out of shock, makes him shuffle towards her side of the room. He’s still grinning from ear to ear when she shakes herself out of it, and his eyes are on hers when she is able to focus on him, just him.

“Hey,” he says, softer than the linen coating his bed, and gentler than the hold of his pinky finger around hers.

“Hey Soldier,” Clarke smirks back, swallowing subtly so as not to scare him away with emotion. She’s going to hug him; she’s not going to be able to stop herself. That’s the only thing she can process before Octavia is practically jumping on him, wrapping thin arms around his neck and forcing him to sit up from the pillows so that she can hug him properly.

Bellamy grunts when he gets tugged up and brings an arm around to the center of his sister’s back to hold her in place regardless of the discomfort it must cause him.

“Bellamy Blake,” Octavia growls, her glossy hair thrown over his shoulder. “What the hell did you do?”

“I got shot,” he says, simple. “You could act like it.”

Clarke gets caught up on the hold he still has on her hand.

“I hate you, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know,”

They break away, him slumping his head back down gracelessly. Clarke snaps her mouth shut with an audible clash of her teeth. His eyes are such an intense color that it must have been building up all this time; days of undispersed brown that the honey is gushing out at an extortionate rate now.

She clears her throat, knowing she should go and get someone. Wells will know what to do now. She has no idea what Bellamy needs checked, holding the five fingers of her hand up would probably be elementary.

“Hey,” she says again, after his eyes fall from his sister and land back on to her, heavy, sleepy still.

His smile falls from his face.

“Holy shit, I got shot,”

She’s never seen someone try this hard to look awake, alert, while obviously about to fall asleep at the same time.

“You did,” she tells him, moving her elbows off of the bed to give him some space.

“Murphy?” he asks, head snapping to the side and then coming back to her again.

“Safe,”

“Everyone else?”

It’s Octavia’s turn to clear her throat, and she does so slowly, making it clear she’ll take this one, but still taking her time with it.

“Sterling is dead,” she says kindly, her hand coming up to Bellamy’s chest as though to shield his heart, even though she’s on the wrong side of him, and only has her hold over his ribcage. “It’s not your fault, Bell.”

He brings his free hand up to rub at his face; it makes some of his hair fall into his eyes. Shuffling up on the bed, on his own, he waits to speak until he’s upright on the pillows. Clarke’s arm has to straighten to keep up, but it’s not like that’s a problem.

“I don’t remember him dying,” he says to his toes poking out of the blanket.

“Lincoln said it was after you were shot,”

“So when you say it’s not my fault…”

“I mean it’s not your fault,”

He scoffs, without saying anything else. Clarke adds it to her list of things to make sure he doesn’t need to redeem himself for, unable to actually speak all that much.

She’s nervous. She hasn’t been this nervous since they were in that wooden cabin, her hand on a fractured window, one thought clear in her mind, ricocheting around it without ever losing momentum. That mantra of ‘he’s going to kiss me’ like the chorus to a song.

He almost died. She needs to tell him so much.

His heartrate is perfectly steady, and Octavia says something that she manages to miss in her state of uncertainty. Clarke distracts herself with pushing away the hair he brought down into his face, leaning forward without hesitation to clear him of one more burden, one small burden that doesn’t mean too much.

It’s probably a mistake. He cuts off midsentence, his thought unfinished when she touches his skin, eyes snapping to her like they’re drawn by magnets.

Clarke pulls her hand back just as quickly.

“No,” Octavia keeps talking, even if her voice is a little thicker. “Nothing lasting.”

He doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t look away from Clarke either. She’s not nervous; she’s terrified.

Her hand is hovering in mid-air, cautious, meaningless if it’s not being used to help him. His eyelashes are longer than they seemed while he was asleep, and darker too. His cheekbones seem lighter; perfectly explainable, perfectly noticeable.

His lips are a little dry, chapped to the point where some of the skin has faded from pink. Clarke busies herself with reaching across her other arm and holding on to the glass of water she’d been drinking from.

She pushes it into his own empty hand before he can say anything.

“Here,” she smiles tightly, nodding to it as though she’d be speaking of anything else.

“Thank you,” he answers, just as shaky. He actually has a reason for the quiver in his voice; he’s been unconscious for days. Bellamy takes his time to drink from the glass. She doesn’t let herself think about where his mouth is along the rim, where her mouth had been, if he’s touching the edge of hers with his.

He doesn’t finish the water inside, leaves enough for later. She knew he wouldn’t drink it all.

When Bellamy turns to his sister, a stream of disappointment rushes through Clarke. She is forced to remind herself that she’s not waiting for anything.

She doesn’t bother taking her eyes away from his face, still lined a little with sweat that she hasn’t been able to get rid of.

“Octavia,” he says lightly. As though what he’s going to say isn’t important. All three of them can read behind that though, because he never uses her full name. “I’m really hungry.”

Clarke slides her chair away from his bed, not taking her hand from his as she stands, still needing to get some respite.

“I’ll go,” she offers, smile still tight. “I bet I could catch the end of lunch if I promise to help Monroe with the rat.”

“There’s a rat?” Octavia asks, smiling on one side of her face.

“A figurative rat,” Bellamy assures her.

“How do you get a figurative rat?”

“It’s… a long story,”

Clarke reaches behind her chair for the jacket that Raven brought down for her, even though she doesn’t need it right now. It’s to hide the smile threatening to bounce back.

“You hit your head pretty hard, huh?” Octavia asks, moving to sit on his bed so that she can sit him up properly, ignoring him when he grumbles sullenly about it.

“Don’t worry too much,” Clarke smirks at him over his sister’s shoulder. Bellamy meets her eye with faintly resisted glee, trying to look annoyed but failing. “I thought Wells was my conscience when I first woke up.”

She puts an arm through her jacket to distract herself from whatever reaction they might have. It’s not supposed to be a dig; the opposite, in fact. She hopes they take it as that.

Clarke moves to wear the other, but she gets stopped by his hand still wrapped over hers. She doesn’t want to make taking it away into a thing, so has to stand there for a second too long, wearing half a jacket, debating what to do.

Octavia moves away to go and get him another pillow from a nearby bed and tucks it under his head. He grimaces as she adjusts, leans more on to one side as though hanging off the edge of a cliff between pain and not so much pain.

“I really could use some food,” he says, bringing the edge of his blanket up a little to the end of his ribcage.

Clarke has to hold back from saying anything; she’s already said she’d be happy to go get something, she just physically can’t. He hasn’t let go.

“I’ll go,” she says again, trying to remind him that she can’t do that while she’s here.

But Bellamy only looks to his sister, ignoring her completely, and gestures toward the door with his head.

“Clarke you stay,” Octavia says slowly, catching on to something that she isn’t. “I’m gonna go and tell Lincoln that Bell’s awake anyway.”

Bellamy snorts before Clarke can argue. “You could go and tell someone who can actually help.”

“Like Clarke’s mom?”

He looks down.

“Yeah, didn’t think so.”

“Get Tsing,” Clarke smiles shyly, staring daggers at the floor. “Let her know.”

“I’ll be back in thirty minutes,” Octavia stands, stretches dramatically and brushes off the legs of her pants to make a show of leaving. “Thirty minutes, okay guys? Thirty whole minutes.”

“Octavia,”

“Glad you’re alive, big brother,” she gives up, patting him softly on the head, spinning so that her hair flies out of the collar of her shirt and practically skipping away.

Clarke takes too long in sitting back down to call it subtle. She moves her chair up his bed to get closer to where he’s sitting. It takes time to muster up the confidence to look at him, his words playing over and over in her head while she notices an untucked corner of the blanket and reaches over his body to put it back where it should be.

“Clarke,” he sighs quietly. “I’m okay.”

“You got shot,”

“Yeah?”

“That’s not okay,”

“Clarke,” Bellamy says again, more stern this time so she stills, brings her arm back and rests her elbows on the mattress to keep them there.

She crosses one leg over the other, then decides against it. She runs a hand through her hair, before she remembers that she tied it back, and gets left with strands all over her face.

Bellamy reaches forward to itch his knee, the lump in his throat bobbing. His heart monitor speeds up, betraying something, but the sound morphs into one long stream of panic for Clarke.

She spent two days waiting for Bellamy to wake up, she hasn’t prepared herself for what to do when he does.

He squeezes her hand in his.

“Echo was here,” she blurts out, watching as her toes tap on the floor. Her feet feel like they’re wading through something thicker than air.

“Hmm?”

Her hand feels like it’s being stared at.

“She came by. Octavia said…”

“O told her to leave?”

“No,” she needs him to know. She’s unsure of how to explain it without saying the L-word. “It was awkward. I don’t know. She… wanted to make sure Echo wasn’t staying because of…”

“Because of you?”

Clarke shrugs, eyes closed and head down.

Bellamy squeezes her hand again, almost checking she’s still here.

“How long was I out for?” he asks after the silence has extended for the Andes to pass by on his heart monitor.

Clarke tries to think, but it’s all just drifted into one long waiting game.

“Couple of days,” she guesses.

“You stayed?”

She hears that guilt she’d forgotten to expect.

“It was different,” Clarke rushes, perched on the edge of her seat, her body lower than his. “From me. I knew you were gonna wake up.”

“Don’t do that,”

“Do what?”

“Make excuses for what I did,”

She bites her lip instead and decides to brave looking at their interlinked fingers. There’s the warmth of those teddy bears, right there in the center of her palm.

“Clarke,” he whispers, his voice a little raspy- from disuse, she reasons.

She hums in response.

“Look at me,”

It’s not like she can say no right now.

How can she tell him that she doesn’t want to hurt him anymore? That the threat of losing him like that was worse than months of watching him ignore her? There’s no way the brown in his eyes is meant for anything other than good, and she’s scared of crying in front of him.

She hasn’t done it yet. She can’t do it now.

She tries to get closer, even closer, her knees bumping into the stem of the monitor, her hand getting left behind as she crawls up his arm.

“How are you feeling?” she asks him, instead of anything else. It’s the only thing that truly matters.

She wonders how shoulders can seem so tense but so at ease all at once. How reaching out seems irresistible to them, how they look as though they’re being held in place by armor.

“Like I got shot,” he says, the muscles in his neck taut from turning to look at her. “What about you?”

“Like you got shot,”

She hears him breathe a laugh.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Clarke decides. “She was really scared when we didn’t know if you’d be okay.”

He looks back to the door that Octavia has just left from, eyebrows asymmetrical like he’s trying to work something out.

“Sorry, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. Just… when someone tells you they hate you, sometimes they’re just saying that so that they don’t have to say something else,”

“Are we still talking about Octavia?” he asks when he lets his head fall again. They shouldn’t do this now, she knows that. Not while there’s still a hole in his abdomen.

“No,” Clarke answers him, regretting even bringing it up, letting honesty shut everything else down. “Seriously, Bell, how bad is it hurting?”

He smiles at that, as though what she’s said is kind. She plays the words over in her head again, trying to catch on to whatever it is. Her head is so heavy, there’s no room for finding things that aren’t there.

She’s about to ask but he speaks before she can.

“It’s bad. Manageable though,”

“You should probably just sleep through it. Sleep will help,”

“You trying to get rid of me, Griffin?” he asks, smile still there, grip tightening to let Clarke know it’s not completely a joke.

She moves forward further, leaning all of her weight on to her elbows so that she can hold her head up, over his chest. She wishes her hair were down; if it were, it’d be falling over his shoulders.

“Of course I am,” she hums, stroking her thumb against his to let him know she knows.

Bellamy closes his eyes and Clarke sees peace.

“I don’t want to sleep,”

“It’s okay. I need to shower anyway, and Roan’s probably getting sick of picking up my slack,”

His hand falls from hers. Wrong thing to say. She’s just got to work out why.

“Sure,” he mumbles, and Clarke watches as he fakes a yawn.

“Do you want me to stay?” Clarke asks, needing simplicity, knowing how much he needs it too.

He still has his eyes closed when he answers; the room feels a whole lot darker than it did ten minutes ago, and she likes this darkness. It feels like night without the cold of night. Like winter without the hurt of winter.

“Do I want you to stay?” he echoes. Clarke nods, afraid that she’s too close to him, afraid that she’s not close enough. The pressure behind her eyes is building. Without the chaos of finding him, without the tension of waiting, she doesn’t know what to do. She just can’t hurt him.

“I can get whoever you need,”

“Need?”

“Bellamy,”

“Can you stay?” he asks, without missing a beat.

“Sure,” she chokes, a tear falling from her eyelashes and landing on his bare chest. She scurries to get rid of it, to wipe it away before he can see, but his hand overlaps hers and keeps her there: skin on skin on skin.

“Do me a favor?”

“Yeah?”

“Get out of that chair,”

“What?”

He’s literally holding her in place. If he wants her to go, he only has to ask. She is only perched on the edge of the seat anyway; if he wants her to stand up it’d be weird but doable so long as her knees don’t give out on her.

“You should sleep,” he says, giving her simplicity and complexity and an easy smile that looks controlled.

“I have slept,” she reasons.

“On a bed,”

“You asked me to stay,”

Bellamy just sighs, moves both hands to brace either side of him and then lifts himself up only to throw himself down a foot away from her. He winces, actually groans, when he lands, and Clarke stands to her feet to help him. He reaches for the bandages at his waist, scared that his insides are going to fall out from the gesture that she guesses was supposed to be fluid and subtle.

“What are you doing?” she snaps, once she’s made sure he hasn’t started bleeding out again.

His voice is strained, his face torn as he stomachs the pain.

“Making room,” is all he can get out.

Clarke looks to the distance between the two of them, the space on the marshmallow pillows and the corner of the blanket that has been folded over disorderly. If he thinks another person is going to be able to fit there then he’s mad, if he thinks she’s going to take his bed while he’s like this then he’s even madder.

“Please,” she snorts, reaching over him just for something to do.

“Please,” he echoes again, no humor there, a vulnerability that feels so rare instead.

“Bellamy, don’t be an idiot,”

“It’s not like I’m going to try anything,” he says, as though she’s being ridiculous, almost sulking if it weren’t for that glimpse into something nervous.

“I didn’t say you would,”

“Then come here,”

He gestures to the space as though it is miles away.

“I won’t fit,” Clarke shoves her hands in her back pockets, stepping back to hold herself down.

“If you’re not sleeping, I’m not sleeping,”

“You’re a child,”

“An injured one,”

“Bellamy,”

“Clarke,”

“I’m fine where I am,” she pushes, moving closer to her chair and sitting all the way to the back of it to prove her point. He watches her with narrowed eyes, smirk creeping up on him before he knows it.

“You’d be better in an actual bed,”

Clarke doesn’t wilt under his challenging gaze, and neither does he under hers. She is silent as she considers him, surprised when his expression melts.

“Do you not want to?” Bellamy asks, his voice dropping a whole octave, getting quiet enough that she has to take her back away from the chair to hear him. He drops his head, looks at his hands where they’re placed limp in his lap, looks at them as though they’re useless where they are.

Clarke lets herself surrender a little, just a little.

“I just don’t want you to get worse,”

“I won’t,” he hums, shifting across some more as though that makes his point valid. “I’d feel less like a hospital patient if you sat here.”

“Why’s that?”

She hopes she knows why: because things will feel normal again. Still,

“Because you’re so tense, you look about ready to shoot something. And I don’t want to get shot,”

“Again,” she corrects, trying to picture herself to see what he sees. She can’t do it.

“Again,” Bellamy says, smug, waiting for something to happen like it was inevitable anyway.

“Fine,” Clarke snaps, pushing the chair back so hard that it screeches against the floor and standing with a flourish, chewing on her lip to keep the nerves down.

His smile only grows as she climbs on to the bed, making sure she’s on top of the blanket so that it’s not too weird, and settling against the pillows. She has to grip at the rail beneath the mattress to keep from falling off, but she doesn’t want to take up too much space. They aren’t touching at all, a thin sliver of something impermeable between them.

“See?” he grins, turning his head completely to the side to look at her. “Much better.”

She has to laugh; it’s a coping mechanism.

“I already told you I need to shower. No comments about how bad I smell or I’m leaving,”

“Not a word,” he promises.

“Now shut up and get some sleep before Tsing gets here and starts prodding you with a stick. You’ve got fifteen minutes before Octavia comes back,”

She glances over at Bellamy, expecting him to either be pretending to be asleep already, or to be still smirking insidiously back at her. No, he’s just watching the border between the two of them, his open hand a few inches away from hers, thinking too hard.

Clarke shuffles some more towards him, as though compelled by the point at which his gaze is so concentrated. Her thumb brushes his wrist before settling. His skin is ridiculously warm, for someone without a shirt on, and she can see the dark hairs lining the outside of his forearm from here.

He’s got freckles on his shoulders that she hasn’t noticed before. Her chin is at a height where it wouldn’t be hard to rest against them. She can count on one hand the number of times she’s seen Bellamy without a top on, so she doesn’t focus on the hard valleys of his abs, or the way the muscle of his pecs juts out solidly. Clarke breathes in deeply, relishing in the scent of smoke and sweat and him. She watches the corner of his shoulder without realizing it, both of them propped up ridiculously high on pillows so they’re not laying down.

She’s wearing a jacket that rustles every time she moves, and it’s not soft enough for right now. She can feel the tightness of her sunburn even as her face remains perfectly still. She doesn’t let herself look above his neck, too scared, too close, but she watches as he swallows thickly.

Good, Clarke thinks. He knows that this was dangerous. He’s just as scared as she is.

The tie in her hair makes her scalp feel like it’s being pulled apart, and there are lumps in the ponytail thanks to her lack of care with it. There is bruising poking out of the dressing, dark blue against his sand colored skin, purple against the ivory gauze.

She should look forward, over to the wall of empty beds opposite the two of them. She should close her eyes and do as they’ve both asked of the other. Her fingers are too jumpy, her breath is too short. He’s watching her too, she can feel that with the angle of his head, with the weight on the air surrounding her.

He’s got the height advantage. He’s always had the height advantage. If she could just lift her eyes, she’d take it away.

“You really scared me, Bell,” she admits, whispered, staring at the definition of his collar bone. She won’t tell him that seeing his fragile body, white from the blood loss, limp from the trauma, falling from the pain, broke her heart. She won’t tell him that.

Clarke leans closer, taking in the delicate cut of his jaw, how it is never not strong. She watches as his lips part, rosied, reminding her that he won’t be wounded forever. He licks them before he speaks.

“Clarke, I’m sorry,” he says, just as quietly, maybe even quieter. He talks at a level that doesn’t let his voice actually work, makes it crack and wean.

He wouldn’t be the man he is though, if putting others before himself wasn’t his first instinct.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, letting her finger and thumb touch and rub together, trying to feel something other than silk.

“No,” he shakes his head, slow, mourning. “I am so sorry. I didn’t say it. I haven’t said it. But for everything, I am sorry. I was so angry, and I gave up on everything. I loved you so much and you were gone, and the whole world just… melted away and the only thing left was me, but I didn’t deserve to live if you were dead,”

“Hey,” she shushes him, moves closer and puts a palm over his wrist as though that’ll keep his words back. He turns his hand over in hers before she can say anything more, holding on to it with strength he won’t let himself see.

“If I could go back, I would have proven your mom wrong. I would have stood my ground and made sure me being in your life was not a burden,”

“Bellamy,” Clarke hums again, feeling the weight of his gaze only on their intertwined fingers, neither of them ignoring it. “You aren’t a burden.”

He scoffs, without any amusement.

“Clarke you sat here miserable for two days because I got myself shot,”

“It wasn’t that miserable,” she tries, knowing that deep down, it wasn’t. She had Octavia the whole time, and she was worried of course, sick to her stomach, but it’s not like all hope was shot through the window. The figurative window. “But that’s like saying everyone we care about is a burden, just because we get hurt when they do-”

“No,” he cuts her off, making Clarke’s point for her. He doesn’t think like that. “Not everyone. Just… me,”

“Bellamy, do you see good in me?”

He doesn’t even respond, and Clarke only lets herself look at the frown that his lips have pulled into. They say ‘obviously’ without words, and they say, ‘why wouldn’t I?’ as though to think any differently would be absurd.

“Do you see good in your sister?”

“Of course,”

“Do you see good in Miller, and in Wells, and Raven?”

“Clarke, what are you-”

“Then why is it so hard for you to see it in yourself?” she asks, gripping on to his hand and not letting it go. She knows he’s not going to answer, because there isn’t an answer. Not really. “You were never a burden; you still aren’t a burden. You’re not mad at the world, you’re mad at yourself; it’s eating you up and I hate it. You aren’t alone anymore Bell, and I’m tired of missing you.”

He pushes even closer, so that she doesn’t have to look into his burning eyes. Her forehead comes to rest on his shoulder, not putting too much of her weight on to him, just a reminder that she’s here.

“I don’t deserve your forgiveness,”

“Tough. Forgiveness isn’t earned. We give forgiveness to the people who need it, not the ones who want it.”

Clarke brings their linked fingers up to her chest, just to feel him some more. She can hear him thinking, hear him chewing on his poor jaw. No wonder the line of it is so finely cut with the grinding that is done to it.

“Clarke I meant it,” he whispers after a while, his whole body coming closer to hers as he turns as much as he can without having to cry out.

“Meant what?”

“Everything,”

And she knows that. Of course she knows that. Questioning her trust or belief in him is futile, she can’t doubt their time, or their words, or their connection.

Not anymore.

She nods her head against his shoulder, breathes deeply as she leans back again and finally forces herself to look into his eyes. They’re already on hers, like they’ve been on hers this whole time, but that’s impossible.

Honey and teddy bears and warmth and conviction there that is irrefutable.

He takes control of their hands, brings them up higher so that they have to look at them. And the smile on his face, the soft line of it, the purity and the calm of it, is gorgeous. Clarke has known peace, Bellamy has fought peace, but this is nothing if not that.

She is mindful of his bullet wound, knows that if it weren’t here, she’d be clinging to him unbreakably. Compromising for getting to see the admiration in his eyes when his gaze falls back to her, is worth it.

“Was somebody singing before?” he asks, still quiet, still just a sailboat in the tranquility of the pacific.

His thumb rubs over the back of her hand, is big enough to do that, big enough to engulf all of it, and Clarke tucks her head into the crook of his neck because if he got to listen to her father’s lullaby, she gets to do this. She gets to hold Bellamy’s hand and breathe him in and cherish him being here and alive.

“They might have been,” Clarke smiles a smile she thinks he won’t see.

She’s wrong about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'These days of dust,'  
> \- I Will Wait, Mumford and Sons.


	39. When you're in the room, I want you to stay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that updates are getting slower, but chapters are also getting longer. At this point, each new chapter is nearing 10k words and for other fics, that can be spaced across three. Having conversations with people is one thing, getting sent messages that-  
> 1\. Bluntly 'remind' me to update  
> 2\. Tell me what I should apparently be putting into each chapter  
> Is not productive or motivating. I'm sorry if things are too slow for anybody, but this is the story that I am telling and you DO NOT have to read it. I have spent eleven hours travelling today and now I'm up at stupid o'clock editing this, just because I feel bad for making people wait another day.  
> Sorry for the rant; I am severely decaffeinated and exhausted.  
> Rant over. Goodnight Vienna.

Clarke has had a lot of experiences that have forced her heartbeat into her ear. Every time she kills something new, her pulse finds a way to make itself known. She has also had to listen to it sound the entire time she was unconscious, spoken through a heart monitor when she thought she’d silenced it.

So waking up to it isn’t strange. It is just different to the sounds of dry vocal chords grinding together, trying to scream but not being able to. It is also different to the sounds of a mattress creaking from above, the springs threatening to give out.

It takes maybe an embarrassing amount of time to notice that the steady thump in her ear isn’t coming from her own heart. The solid warmth beneath her head probably should have told her that; it just feels too normal and too new all at once. It’s complicated.

Clarke squirms into his chest, moves the arm she’s got around his waist tighter to make sure it is definitely him. When her fingers hit gauze, she tries to jerk away, the last few days rushing back to her all at once. The bullet wound is on the same side of his body that she’s on, and she’s not directly leaning on to it, but she is terrified of making it worse.

Bellamy’s hand is heavy on her waist though, holding Clarke on to her side because he can’t lie the same way. She can’t pull away too far because he keeps her in his space, and if he’s okay with her here then it’s not like she’s going to move either.

This was always her favorite place. It’s not like that is going to change anytime soon.

He’s breathing deeply enough to still be asleep, the top of her head pressed to his cupid’s bow lightly. There are too many pillows propping them up to be properly comfortable, yet she can’t remember the last time she was this cozy, this warm.

His thumb is rubbing circles around the space above her hip tenderly, absently, and Clarke wonders how many rings he’s formed there. She shifts up a little, letting her head rest on the stretch of his shoulder so that she’s not as close to his abdomen, tucking her nose into his skin some more, because she’s only human.

She’s happy ignoring any light in the room, keeping her eyes shut, hiding half of her easy smile as she turns her face.

Every few seconds, Bellamy blows hot air through his nose, making escaped strands of her hair shiver. Each time, the low sound of it vibrates through her whole body, gives her the feeling of having toes back. This bed is not built for two people; that much is obvious from the way one of Clarke’s legs is forced to hang off the edge, but when they’re like this, they’re not really acting like two separate people anyway.

She pushes her luck, nuzzling further into his neck as her hand lifts to rest on his other shoulder, just to stop from accidentally nudging the bandage again. Clarke is completely surrounded by the scent of home, and it is addictive.

“Don’t wake up yet,” Bellamy mumbles against her hair, making her breath catch and her whole body jump.

She hasn’t felt this well rested in what feels like months, which is a scary thought, but not one that she is willing to back down from. Clarke can feel her eyelashes against the skin underneath her eyes, holding everything in place. The blanket still acts as a wall between them. From her waist down, he is underneath it and she is on top of it, which is probably for the best. She could have reopened his wound if she were any closer.

“I can’t stay here forever,” Clarke whispers, grinning despite herself.

Bellamy sighs and tugs her closer, rolling her over her side so that she doesn’t have to hold herself up. It might look like he’s using her as a shield, covering his body with hers, but Clarke knows that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“I know that,” he says, voice scratchy from sleep. “So don’t wake up yet.”

She waits, just in case he falls back to sleep, but his breathing stays this steady and he moves his head so that his cheek rests on top of her head.

“I think it might be too late,”

He laughs shortly, defeatedly, in her ear before Clarke extracts herself. She doesn’t go too far, just far enough for her to be confident that she’s not going to hurt him by moving. She still catches his wince as he sits up properly, the pain so unrestrainable that he even checks his waist like he’s expecting to find a whole new injury.

“Rise and shine,” Octavia smirks, drawing Clarke away from him out of shock. She is sat in her chair again, a swiss knife in her hand as she practices opening and closing it. Her feet are on his bedside table, raised higher than her shoulders thanks to the disproportionate height of it. She’s not looking at them, the hint of shyness creeping around the edges of her smug expression.

Clarke feels her pink cheeks burn through the already pretty significant patch of sun-seared skin. She ducks her head, moving away from him some more, until she’s almost toppling off of the bed completely.

“I thought you were getting food,” Bellamy gruffs out, reaching for the edge of his blanket to pull it back to where it was before he fell asleep. He’s still in the same pair of track pants that the medics had put him in a couple of days ago. It’s not like they have been caught doing anything actually worth embarrassment. Still, the flush lining Clarke’s face would beg to differ.

“Yeah,” his sister snorts, kicking her feet down. “Like eight hours ago.”

“Eight hours?” Clarke flinches, thinking about the things she was meant to be doing. “Has Tsing been here?”

“Sure,” she nods unapologetically. “Says you’re doing good Bell. Nothing to worry about.”

“Am I getting out of here anytime soon?” he asks, inspecting the dressing that must be a replacement of an older one; it certainly looks different from the other one. Less excessive.

Clarke hides another smile in the back of her hand, disguises it as a stretch, thinking back to how she had the same reaction to waking up in a hospital bed.

“Give it a few days, at least until you’re good to walk again,”

“I reckon I could walk now,”

“Sure you could,” Octavia practically laughs, pulling at a setting of the knife and grinning when a smaller edge pops out. “You wanna try it?”

Bellamy grumbles a bit, looks to the ground like it’s a whole cliff dive away.

“Maybe when it stops feeling like someone’s been poking around inside my stomach,”

“That won’t go away for a while,” Clarke says, only drawing from her own experience. “It took weeks until the scar on my head started to feel normal.”

Bellamy does tense up when she talks about that, but not as much as he usually would. The whole topic of it is going to be awkward for a while; it’s not like they can ignore it.

Octavia leans forward in her chair, not seeming uncomfortable in the slightest.

“I forgot about that part,” she grimaces. “Is it gone now?”

Clarke reaches up to the back of her skull, wondering the same herself. She feels Bellamy watch the movement.

“No,” she answers, running a finger along the distorted crack in her scalp.

“Can I see?”

“Sure,”

No one has really seen it. Not anyone who hasn’t been a doctor, so it feels strange to let Octavia actually look at it. Even Clarke hasn’t been able to, for obvious reasons. She walks around the bed while Clarke lets her hair down, knowing it’ll be more visible if she can maneuver the shield to it. She leans forward, missing Bellamy’s familiar heat already.

“Gnarly,” Octavia cringes good-humoredly.

“Yeah,”

Bellamy clears his throat as she moves back around to her seat and reaches over Clarke for the glass of water that remains untouched on her side. She holds her breath as his chest touches hers, counts from one to ten a couple of times to distract herself from getting distracted.

“Does it still hurt?” he asks, quiet enough and close enough that it won’t reach his sister. Clarke holds his gaze, having to look up as he towers above her. She can see that guilt inching its way back in, so doesn’t feel too nervous about reaching for his hand while he moves to sit down again, twiddling their thumbs together underneath the blanket.

“No,” she assures him.

If she shakes her head too much, the screws feel a little loose. The night of drinking left a magnified hangover thanks to the chink in the armor to her skull, but apart from that, she’s pretty sure it’s okay now. Things heal. Things recover.

“Look what Lincoln found for me,” Octavia, as though they haven’t noticed it yet, flings the knife to the small contraption out in an overcomplicated gesture, beaming when it lands near her palm and takes it in the other hand to close it. Like a child throwing a ball from hand to hand.

“How sweet,” Bellamy smiles, lips pressed too tight together to be genuine. Clarke nudges his shoulder with hers.

“It wouldn’t kill you to be nice to him,” his sister sulks, without too much hurt. “You know, since he saved your life and all.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes, kicking back and raising the knee of his uninjured side, making Clarke feel strangely protected, keeping her in this bubble, letting her know she’s allowed to be comfortable.

“Seems pretty convenient if you ask me,”

“So does getting shot an inch away from a target that would have killed you,”

“I have been nice to him,”

Octavia scoffs and nods her head like she knows better.

“Sure you have,”

“I have!”

“Bell, you spilt a whole jug of water into his lap the day I told you we’re moving in together,”

“You didn’t?” Clarke has to hold a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. She’s half outraged, half ecstatic.

“Oh he did,” Octavia growls, flicking the knife around closer to Bellamy’s head than she probably should be.

Bellamy looks to Clarke from the corner of his eye, fighting down a smile and she flicks her eyebrows at him to warn him not to laugh. He mimes zipping his lips together while his sister is preoccupied, then looks at Octavia with his mouth clamped together so hard she can see the outline of his teeth and makes a humming sound, trying to be passive. Clarke can’t help but snigger, plays it off better than she thought she would as she uses his body as a shield.

“I cleaned it up, didn’t I?”

“And that makes it okay?”

“If he’s so caught up in his own pride that he can’t even take a joke then-”

“Clarke, would you tell him to give it a rest?” Octavia groans, smacking her hands against his mattress and not-so-accidentally hitting his leg in the process.

“He’s only doing it to fuck with you,” Clarke laughs, holding both her hands up and refusing to get in between the two of them. She catches Bellamy’s contented smirk as she peels away from the bed, winks when she kicks one of her shoes to get it to sit right again. “If he hated Lincoln he’d be doing a lot worse than playing practical jokes.”

She thinks back to the first time they actually spent any down time together just the two of them, when they went swimming and ended up play fighting the entire time, like kids in a freaking paddling pool. She smiles as she reaches to do her laces, letting her shoe rest on the end of the bed.

“Hell, the first time me and him hung out together, he got me soaking wet,”

Clarke regrets it as soon as the words leave her mouth. She thought she’d been embarrassed when she woke up to Octavia beaming down at them, that’s nothing compared to Bellamy’s reaction to this. He’s biting down on his fist, tangibly having to stop himself from laughing. Octavia’s got both of her hands over her face, physically distancing herself from the cringe.

“Oh grow up,” Clarke rolls her eyes, knowing she’s gone a distinctive shade of a tomato red, hoping that if she just ignores it, they’ll ignore it too.

“I said nothing,” Bellamy grins, that toothy boyish grin. She’s seen an awful lot of his face, this one, right here, is her favorite.

“You said everything,” she points roughly to his hand. Him trying to hide his amusement only makes it worse. Her ears feel so hot they might as well fall off. “I’ll leave you guys to enjoy that one then.”

Clarke knows she’s just got to own it, it’s not like she can pretend she didn’t say it. She meant the _river_ ; he knows that just as well as she does. She hangs her head in a mock-courtesy, smiling too wide to act like she’s annoyed.

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Bellamy, I haven’t showered in days. As much as this,” she gestures between the three of them. “Has been charming, I should probably go change.”

“Oh, sure,” he nods, shaking his head out to remind himself he’s being slow. It’s strangely endearing.

“Octavia, remember he’s delicate-”

“I’m not _delicate_ ,”

Clarke bites her lip. “So at least hold back from hitting him in the face until I’m here again. That way, you don’t get held fully accountable,”

Octavia salutes to one side with her new toy. “You coming back?”

She looks to Bellamy, takes in the way he is playing with the frayed edges of the blanket in an attempt to look occupied, the traces of a smile still there and a warmth radiating from his skin that is slowly nursing itself back to full strength. She looks to him, sees edges to his arms, sees shadows under his jaw, sees a chip to his otherwise straight teeth.

“Of course I am. See you later Bell,”

His head snaps up. If she weren’t at the end of his bed, out of reach, maybe they’d do something other than _say_ goodbye.

 “Later,” he echoes, softly, voice so low it threatens to take out both of her legs.

Clarke takes the jacket off as she walks away, knows once she’s out of this room, out of the underground, she’ll be drowning in her own sweat. There’s no adjustment period to leaving the med ward, because she hasn’t been gone for months, and she’s not walking out into the unknown. She just walks down the corridor wearing shoes that feel different since she walked out, shoes that give her some sort of lift now. _Later_ , she promises herself instead of looking back once more. Knowing that she can get later, is enough.

 

…

 

Bellamy manages to convince Octavia that he is mildly capable quite soon after Clarke leaves. There’s a lot of reverse psychology involved; he knows the easiest way to get her to lay off is by pulling her in too close. So she relents and lets him brush his own teeth and clean up over the basin she gets and leaves on his bedside.

They use plastic toothbrushes, the kind he’s been using all of his life. He’s never tried an electric one but wouldn’t want to anyway. She watches him curiously as he does it, moves forward to wipe at the toothpaste he drops on his pillow when he moves to lean over the bowl.

Even when he dislocated his ankle last year, Octavia didn’t try to be the caretaker. It’s strange; he doesn’t hate it, but he’s never had a chance to learn if he hates it or not. She throws a t-shirt at him, tells him to stop showing off his battle wound for the sake of it, but doesn’t push anymore.

Bellamy rips the pads of the heart monitor away from his chest when she’s not looking. He knows he doesn’t need them, can’t stand the sound of his own heart giving everything away to the entire room, and Octavia punches him in the shoulder when she sees the wires trailing to the floor like vines along a forest bed.

He swings his legs over, lets his feet hover with bare toes edging towards the ground, and takes his time with getting the top over his head. It’s bad; the pain spreads from the center of his body in record speed, making the sealed hole feel like it is peeling and tearing all the way across his stomach.

But he wants to be able to do it himself. The faster he can do things like this, the faster he’ll be back on his feet. And that means the faster he’ll be back out there.

It might be dangerous, and it might be exhausting, but it is something wider than routine. The thought of staying in one place for the rest of the apocalypse, however long that may be, is nauseating.

Maybe it’s too soon to stand just yet, but he doesn’t want Clarke to come back just to find him in the same pants he was wearing all last night.

He’s still trying to climb his way into a shirt not made for people who can’t raise their arms above their head when Raven’s shrill voice fills the room, and he freezes.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Bellamy isn’t too sure what to do. He pulls the edge of the t-shirt down to get his head free, has to stop to let out the groan that has reached its breaking point, then turns to Octavia for clarification.

“What does it look like?” he asks, not turning around to face her, as his sister remains unaffected, still playing with the switch knife.

“Like you almost died, and you’re already getting ready to take off again,”

Bellamy takes his time with rolling the top the rest of the way down and hesitates when he gets to the boundary of his dressing. He moves back to the center of the bed, straightening his legs out because that’s the only way they can sit at the minute, to see Raven and Murphy walking towards them.

Murphy has got his head down, trailing behind her, following her footsteps as his only way of navigation. Bellamy groans inwardly, knows how awkward this is bound to be.

“So I’m not allowed to dress myself now?”

“You know you’ve gone white? I don’t think getting dressed is meant to do that,”

“Oh please,” Bellamy scoffs when Raven slumps down at the end of the bed. “Take a seat.”

Murphy hovers at her side, hands in his pockets, foot drawing shapes on the ground reluctantly.

“How’re you doing?” Raven asks, patting around her like she’s looking to hold on to his leg, to comfort him or something. He’s glad she doesn’t find it.

“Doing good,” he answers honestly. The pain sucks, like really sucks. He’d rather not have been shot but it’s not… the worst thing in the world. It’s manageable, and he can see a way out of it. He knows his skin will heal and his blood will replenish and it’s not like he’s lost anything. Raven looks dubious and Octavia is sat with her eyes half-closed, acting as though she’s heard this a hundred times over when she really hasn’t.

“You don’t have to lie,”

“I’m not. Seriously, it hurts, but when doesn’t getting shot hurt?”

“That’s a dumb way to look at it,”

Bellamy just shrugs. She’s the one who asked.

“You never do anything without a reason,” he says instead of pretending. “So to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Raven, surprisingly, beams at him.

“I’d forgotten how shitty you are at being cordial,”

“I got shot,”

“You don’t get to use that as your excuse for everything,” Octavia smirks, sighing as she pokes his hip with the handle to her knife.

“Some things,”

“Blake, you are a self-sacrificing, pretentious piece of shit,” Murphy blurts out, head snapping up and his expression is a blank canvas, like he hasn’t caught up with the words before they’re getting out. “And the bullet was meant for _me_.”

“It wasn’t personal,” Bellamy lies, grimacing while he tries his best to figure out which way to go with this.

“Does that matter?”

“You’d rather me let you get shot?”

Murphy closes his mouth, gives himself a moment to think as well. The distaste in his eyes feels accusatory, but Bellamy waits for him to voice whatever it is. There’s no easy way out of anything, there’s no way to make one, this clearing of the air is the best they are going to get.

“You were supposed to be the bad guy,” he says eventually, under his breath, humor without enough humor and snark without enough snark.

Bellamy has nothing for that.

“That wasn’t about being good or bad. I wasn’t trying to be anything,”

“You were trying to be dead,”

“No,” he admits, kicking Raven lightly to get her to shift off of the blanket. There’s too many people around here for him to be underneath a cover. Bellamy bites back the stabbing pain that shoots through him when he lifts himself up and over the rumpled corner of the sheet, swinging one leg at a time heavily. The movements look a lot like the ones of that puppet in the movie when he’s smoking a cigar with that donkey guy. “I wasn’t.”

“Then why would you do it?”

Murphy’s not going to be able to move past it until he’s got his answer, but Bellamy doesn’t have one. It’s not about why, not in the heat of the moment and in the chaos of it all.

“Because he’s _not_ the bad guy,” Octavia says casually, back against her chair and her arms folded, finally still, considering the three of them. “You just don’t want to see that. You never did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Raven asks, not aggressively, no confrontation. She moves to face inwards properly, folding her legs over one another to settle in. It’s probably the most agreeable way to be.

Murphy gives up with standing, relenting to the fact that this won’t be like ripping a bandaid off. He grumbles over to Clarke’s empty chair, pulls it down the bed a little so that he won’t be practically in Bellamy’s face, and lands on it heavily.

“It means Clarke was dying,” Octavia sighs, then sighs again when Murphy tenses up even more. “Well it’s not like we were gonna be able to talk about this without talking about that, right? She was dying and-”

“She died,” Murphy bites.

“Okay,” Bellamy watches his sister nod her head, accepting it possibly for the first time. The pain she’d been feeling about it always reminded him of the riptides that lifeguards warn you about at the beach. Invisible, convincingly normal, but there all the same. Overwhelming and unfightable. “Clarke died. You saw your best friend die, you saw your freaking hero die, but he saw…”

“Say it,” Raven shrugs, a lot less on the offence than he’d expect her to be about this. “You still feel all of those things, right?” she asks Bellamy in a way that lets him know she’s only going to believe one answer.

This isn’t talking to Wells between strangers, a campfire that couldn’t reach her toes, and an uncertainty surrounding everything.

“The short answer will do,” Murphy curls his nose up. “Save the lyric for later.”

“Then yeah,” Bellamy nods, matching Raven’s shrug. “I do.”

He doesn’t say ‘of course’ to them. While it’s something he can’t help but need out there, it would be an insult to them.

“We fell apart,” Octavia carries on. “And we hurt each other for different reasons, but the hurt that matters, the one that had no reason, was Clarke’s. Because we all hurt her in some way or another, and-” Bellamy squeezes his eyes shut, understands this is something he can’t ignore. “We need to find a way to move on from it. If she can forgive all of us, we can forgive each other, right? There’s no bad guy in this.”

“Apart from Abby,” Raven says to her knuckles, like she doesn’t want to have to say it at all, like she’s afraid it’ll open another can of worms.

Bellamy doesn’t want to assume anything or make out like he wants anyone to take sides, so his head snaps up and he opens his mouth to ask something but comes up with nothing.

“She found me on the day you two came back,” she gestures between him and Murphy. “She wanted me to talk to Clarke.”

“What did she say?” he needs to know. He doesn’t know why.

“Enough for us to know that she didn’t hold back with you.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy scratches the back of his neck, thinking back to it. “No, she didn’t.”

“I want to say sorry, Bellamy,” Raven says, not uncomfortable. “I stayed while the rest of you couldn’t, and I should have fought harder for us to be together.”

He nods his head, as though forgiveness is a thing he actually has to think about. “Me too.”

“Is that it now? Can we finally put this to bed?”

“Nope,” Octavia shrugs, focused on the chair opposite her. “Someone’s forgetting something.”

Murphy rolls his head back, making a show of groaning and sighing. Then he looks, from sullen eyes, to Bellamy.

“I wouldn’t have done it. If it were the other way around, just so you know,”

“I wouldn’t have expected you to,” Bellamy shrugs, not affected. He wouldn’t have wanted him to either, but he leaves that unsaid.

“Shut up. I shouldn’t have said everything I said. I might have been projecting; either way, you didn’t deserve it,”

“Still forgetting something,” Octavia sings, in a voice too high pitched.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Murphy growls, not moving his lips as though if he convinces his body he’s not saying it, it will become actuality. If Bellamy could reach that far, he’d cuff him around the back of the head.

“So am I,”

“Is that it?” his shoulders slump, like he’s letting six months fall from his lungs.

“I don’t know. O, is that it?”

“That’s it,”

Bellamy’s pillow still smells like Clarke. He’s sat up on a mountain of them, scared to chase her imprint away, not scared enough to lean away from it. He reaches for the glass of water that she left behind, finishes it, then takes a few seconds to recover from the movement.

Octavia dives straight into gossiping with Raven, exchanging notes on what they’re assuming is a blossoming romance between Maya and Jasper, the kid from down here who always seems like reality hasn’t quite sunk in for him. Bellamy only half listens, weaves in and out between being present and somewhere else. He doesn’t overthink any of the things he does say though, not like he’s been doing lately around everyone. Situations like this aren’t the chore that they became, and when Raven tells them that they have to go, he doesn’t find himself jumping on to the chance to be alone again. Being alone isn’t a reprieve or a relief.

Raven says goodbye by latching on to his foot over the wall of his blanket, awkward, but strangely warming all the same. Murphy even claps him on the shoulder.

He brushes his teeth again after they’re gone, refusing to acknowledge Octavia’s smug grin while he does so.

“She won’t care, you know,”

He’s not so vain that he’d ask for a mirror, but Bellamy uses his hands to stop his hair from falling flat at the back of his head, hoping it doesn’t look strange or too chaotic from the days of sleep.

“Who?” he bites. If she gets to be all righteous then he doesn’t have to make it easier for her to poke fun.

He makes sure the edges of the sleeves to his t-shirt aren’t rolled unevenly, thankful for the black of it just in case there’s a wrinkle he can’t catch.

“I need to shave,”

“Yeah, nice try,”

Bellamy is being serious; he might be edging towards thirty but that doesn’t mean he has to completely give up. He mastered using a knife to do it long before they arrived in Vancouver, remembers how Raven made him shave her legs for her once during a slow-moving watch shift. The shadow coating the lower half of his face is probably leaning more to the side of looking homeless than rugged.

“I’m being serious,”

“Of course,” she chides, not even looking up. She’s got her sneakers on his bed, more comfortable than he could ever be here.

“Don’t you have a boyfriend to entertain?”

“Don’t worry Bell, he’ll be down later,”

He drops his head heavily to the pillows. He’s already counting down the seconds until he can leave this damn bed.

 

…

 

Clarke isn’t sure she’s ever gotten ready so quickly, maybe tying in second with the duckling pajamas fiasco, but she almost slips on the slimy tiles of the shower room in her haste, leaves her drawers thrown open and tries to do her hair on her way back down from Ark floor.

She runs into Roan on the way through, who catches both of her arms in his hands to keep her steady.

“Woah, where’s the fire?” he asks, lifting Clarke off her feet and spinning her around in a one-eighty as though it’ll help her get to where she’s going.

“Sorry,” she breathes, knocking at Roan’s hat in retaliation.

“He’s doing better?”

“Well he’s already complaining, but he’s…”

“Awake?”

“Yep,”

“Clarke,” he calls, when she has spun around on her heels and is getting ready to take off again.

“What is it?”

“Team meeting tonight,”

“So soon?” cocking her head to the side, she supposes they can’t put work on hold for too long. Life goes on, scars and all.

His expression tells her that much. It was rhetorical anyway, it’s not like she’s going to try to change his mind either way, so she takes his short nod as an answer and swings the door to this floor open like it weighs nothing.

When she sees Jasper, Maya and Harper walking through to the ground floor, she figures she should probably grab some food for herself before she heads back down to the infirmary. Clarke can’t actually remember the last time she ate and gets reminded of it in full force when her peripheral vision acknowledges the dropship.

She catches up to the three of them and they let her join in on their idle conversation in a way that most people wouldn’t. It is dominated by Jasper talking shit ninety percent of the time, and Clarke notices the way he races forward to hold the door open for the three of them, eyes always lingering on Maya, and how he goes out of his way to stay next to her when they queue at the serving station.

The luminescence of the white lights lining the ceiling are a stark difference to the med ward; it makes the hall feel heavier and like she’s being held down, which is a thought she shakes away before it has a chance to properly settle.

“Where’ve you been?” Jasper asks her when they take a seat a table down from the Ark, her with her back to them so that she doesn’t get noticed by Echo and Niylah already there. Niylah’s not a problem, she’d just rather keep her distance from the former.

“You didn’t hear?” Clarke asks quietly, feeling like the girls probably have a right to know about Bellamy considering he played a significant part in saving their lives.

“No?”

“The team got caught in a honey trap. Sterling didn’t make it back, and Bellamy got-” her voice catches on something when Harper’s head shoots up. “He got shot.”

“Shot?”

“Yeah,”

There isn’t a need to go into detail. It’s not her detail to give, so she wouldn’t even if she wanted to.

Harper’s face loses its color; Clarke can’t tell if it’s the idea of anyone getting shot, or of Bellamy specifically being injured.

“He’s okay,” she rushes to say. “It was just a close call.”

She doesn’t meet Clarke in the eye when she speaks, occupied by spearing some potatoes on to her fork.

“That must have been hard,” her tone is unreadable, so Clarke doesn’t try to read it.

“I wasn’t the one who got shot,”

Maya says her name, leaning- perhaps unnecessarily- into Jasper so that they can talk without people around them listening in.

“Is he in the infirmary?”

Clarke nods back, half of the food on her own plate already gone.

“And he’s allowed visitors?” Harper asks, elbow on the table.

“Sure. I’m going down in a minute if you want to come?”

“We’re on laundry in an hour. We can drop in tonight though?”

“I’m sure he’d like that,” Clarke smiles, knowing she’ll probably have to hear him complaining about it during the aftermath of their visit.

Harper moves to ask something else, but she gets cut off by something heavy landing on Clarke’s side. She jerks around to see what it is, raising an arm to stop it from getting any closer, but the lady she’s only ever noticed from a distance reaches for her elbow and clings on to it, tugging Clarke even closer into her space.

She doesn’t want to cause a scene, or make it look like she is unnecessarily uncomfortable, but the way she’s sat down on the bench means she is leaning on to Clarke’s thigh.

“You have to help me,” the woman, who has never said a word to her before, breathes like she’s waking up from a nightmare. It is confident enough that Clarke is silent for a moment too long, tries to think back to where they became reliant upon one another along the way, but there is nothing to pick up.

Her eyes are bloodshot red, brown fading to black from sleep deprivation, and her arms are spiny without being thin. Like if Clarke takes her forearm, it’ll snap. She barely registers the fingernails digging into her skin, still trying to catch up.

“I’m- I’m sorry?”

“He’s out there. They, they won’t let him in, but I saw him,”

Clarke blinks, pulls away once she’s gathered enough sense to do so, then tries to work this out.

“Who?” she asks, moving further back.

“My baby, I saw him,”

Looking behind her shoulder to Ark, she sees Niylah already catching on to whatever is happening, standing to her feet and nodding when she meets Clarke’s eye, letting her know that she is going to help.

“Where?”

This woman is wearing glasses that have a chunk of the lens missing from the corner of them, greying teeth and breath that reminds her of college mattresses, the ones people leave on the corner of the street when they become unusable.

She’s still got Clarke’s arm between her fingernails but pulling away might set of some sort of chain reaction.

“Out there,” she squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head, getting rid of something Clarke can’t see.

Handling walkers is one thing, fighting is something she can just take for granted. This is not. She has no idea how to approach this.

“Hi there, Mrs. Howard,” Niylah appears, probably from the gates of Heaven if the way Clarke finally catches her breath is anything to go by. “Shall we go and talk about this somewhere more private?”

The woman stands to her feet, bringing Clarke’s arm with her as though she hasn’t even noticed how close she is to popping it. “I _tried_ with you,” she snaps, accusatory and unsettled. People are definitely starting to turn their heads. “You didn’t listen!”

“Ma’am I did listen. We’ve already told you, if there were anyone outside of those gates, we’d have-”

“He’s my boy!” she throws Clarke’s wrist at Niylah like it might make her wake up from something too. Clarke stands up, tentatively places a hand on the woman’s shoulder to try to guide her away from becoming a spectacle.

“I’ll listen,” Clarke says, quiet enough to not be projecting, loud enough to be heard.

‘Mrs. Howard’ turns on her heels and practically tears through the central aisle up to the doors to the mess hall, and Clarke sends a pleading look to Niylah.

When the three of them are out of the mess, Niylah makes sure to close the door solidly, shutting them out from the bustling of too many conversations at once, and silence prickles the air between them all. This isn’t her first time dealing with this unstable woman, her tired eyes say as much.

“If we saw anyone outside, we would let them in,” Niylah says slowly, glancing at Clarke from the corner of her eye to let her know she doesn’t have to stick around if she doesn’t want to.

The woman has stopped reacting to each breath she takes, in fact she’s stopped reacting to anything at all. She’s stood, arms by her sides, expression completely blank, moles on her face too large to be called freckles. It’s worse than the screaming, Clarke thinks, as they wait for her to snap.

And snap she does. It’s an explosion of arms and scraps of hair that windmill in her sprint. She jumps on Niylah before either of them can realize what she’s doing, throwing flat palms forward and not holding back.

Clarke springs into action; she repeats a move that Octavia taught her right at the beginning, driving a leg between the two of them and using the woman’s waist as a pivot through which to separate them. She tries to stop her head from hitting the ground too hard, but her eyes have turned almost murderous, and her hands were wrapped around Niylah’s neck.

“Are you okay?” she asks, turning her head around to check on her.

“Fine,” Niylah breathes, adjusting the neckline of her vest top. “Stay here, I’m going to get Indra.”

“Who?”

But she’s already walking away, and Clarke has to put more effort into holding Mrs. Howard down because she’s starting to bite out.

She’s back in a minute or two, bringing with her a woman that Clarke certainly hasn’t met yet, but there is no room for pleasantries or greeting, because whoever this is, puts a hand to her shoulder, telling her to move her foot from Mrs. Howard’s wrist and back away. And Clarke has had her fill of uncertainty, so she does as she’s asked, and walks before she can get hit by the woman’s raging fists.

She doesn’t want to know what happens next. This week has been chaotic enough, and ignorance is bliss.

Clarke doesn’t bother going back into the mess hall, there’s only really one thing she wants right now, and it isn’t lumpy potatoes or still wet kidney beans.

She dives into the infirmary, almost falls over with the force she puts into it, forgetting to remember that they don’t lock it when there is no one in surgery. Seeing Bellamy, ten beds down, cast out to the ocean of uniform blankets and empty bedside tables, makes Clarke feel like it has been ten days since she was last here. Time has a cruel way of unfolding, picks and chooses how fast he wants to move. For some reason, he always races past the moments she gets with Bellamy.

She’s determined to make time stay with them today.

He is playing with Octavia’s knife when Clarke starts walking towards them, and she’s already smiling at the way he holds it with ease. Moving his hands around each other like they are just two simple waves converging, creating a fluid figure of eight that has been knocked on to its side.

She gets to see him see her, his eyebrows jumping, his eyes widening, one of his cheeks lifting when his one-sided smirk catches on. Show off.

Bellamy has decided to put a t-shirt on, and she refuses to let herself be disappointed.

By the time Clarke reaches the two of them, Octavia throwing her shoe ridiculously high to the ceiling to keep herself occupied. It’s certainly a sight for sore eyes; she regrets ever leaving.

“What?” she has to ask, when his gaze has followed her the whole way towards them. He’s got this look in his eyes, one that makes the brown in them seem like something from a fairy-tale, one that he knows and she doesn’t. “Have I got something on my face?”

She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand, slumping into her seat- which has been moved back down to his waist. Clarke doesn’t try to move it back to where it had been before, worried about making it too obvious. Just because she wants to be close to him, as close as she’d been this morning, it doesn’t mean he needs that, or wants it.

Bellamy just laughs, the other side of his mouth reaching to form one of those crescent smiles. He stops flicking the knife around, closing it up to give it back to his sister.

“O, you’re officially off duty,”

Octavia doesn’t waste any time in getting her shoe back on to her foot, snapping up the swiss army knife like she knows that Bellamy is planning on stealing it.

“How’s Lincoln doing?” Clarke asks, using conversation as her excuse to lean away from the back rest. She looks for any sign that he might have been here, the position of her chair is enough evidence.

“Oh he’s fine,” Octavia says, waving her shoe. “Better. Still shaken but he’s pretending not to be.”

“Tell him I said thanks,” Bellamy gruffs out, shuffling along on the bed to get comfortable.

Clarke snaps her head to him the second he speaks, and his sister must have the same shock, because she does the same thing.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not saying it again,” he growls, looking to his lap.

Octavia stands to her feet, smile beaming off the seams in her teeth.

“You can tell him that yourself. Bye Clarke,”

“Bye,” Clarke grins back, nodding her head and eyes following the girl out of the room, her feet stepping lighter than she’d ever have expected of someone who looked so broken just days before.

When she looks back to Bellamy, he’s already on the other side of the bed, almost tipping off the edge of it with the room he has left bare. He is watching the ceiling mindfully to let Clarke know this isn’t a big deal. It is a big deal though, and he might know how to go about this sort of thing with such innateness, but she has got no idea.

So Clarke does the first thing she can think of, and stands to her feet, walking around the end of the bed and reaching Octavia’s abandoned seat. He’s leaning toward her like this, but if she’s going to take up room on his bed, she’s going to do it in a way that lets him sleep however he wants. If he wants to be on his side, without the threat of falling off, and without the pain of everything weighing on to his injury, she needs to be on this side.

“Move,” she sighs when he just pinches his eyebrows together, and then he is wriggling across the one foot of space left.

He’s on top of the blanket now, his black track pants reaching his ankles, the ties to the waist knotted once.

He is already rolling over, simpering with the realization of what she was trying to do. Clarke climbs on, kicks her shoes off because she’s not planning on leaving any time soon, and balances her ear on to his pillow. They’re strangely propped up again, not completely lying down. Perhaps that would feel too intimate.

No. She doesn’t think she’s ever associated ‘too intimate’ with anything to do with him. She’s not going to start now.

“Okay?” he asks, quieter than he has to be since they’re alone, tucking his hand underneath his side of the pillow adorably.

“Yeah,” Clarke mirrors him. It feels like that time her school did a lock-in, and she got to spend the night whispering to her first crush. It feels like that but better. Because it’s Bellamy. Because it is more than a crush.

His eyes catch on her forearm.

“Woah, what happened?” he frowns, reaching out before Clarke can see what he’s talking about. She lets him take her arm, watches and chews on her lip as he turns it around in both of his hands, revealing blotchy and shallow cuts that aren’t the smooth curve of the woman’s nails. She was too reckless for that, to cut finely.

“That woman who lives on sixth,” she hums, distracting herself with the concentration on his face when he traces each mark.

“The one who never speaks to anyone?”

“Yeah, wears those glasses that cut her eyes in half,”

“Sure?” he nods, still cradling her arm.

“I think she wanted me to find her son. I don’t know what was going on, she said she’d seen him outside, but no one goes outside. Niylah got it worse than I did,”

His grip slips from hers, but Clarke doesn’t want to let go completely. As Bellamy’s hand slides down hers, she resists shuddering, and the back of his touches faintly to the sheets. Clarke occupies herself with following it, pressing the tips of her fingers to his idly, slowly, without a pattern or rhythm to it.

“Are you okay?” Bellamy asks again, heavier, because he knows now that she probably isn’t.

She closes her eyes, breathing a laugh.

“I think I’m better at dealing with zombies than humans,” she admits.

Nobody ever says that word. Clarke can count on one hand the number of times she’s heard it spoken aloud. She wonders if it’s the apocalypse version of a vow, a thing you only share with people who are going to stick around.

“What happens when somebody actually loses it?”

Bellamy is quiet as he thinks; Clarke doesn’t mind waiting, doesn’t mind making time wait for them, pushing her index finger to his and letting the heel of her hand fall, like they’re about to catch something being thrown from her to him, or from him to her.

“There was a guy a couple of months ago,”

“Before I woke up?”

He nods, unafraid of talking about that time now that she knows about it. “He stood up on a table and started waving a butter knife around, screaming about Satan and how we’re all just trapped in purgatory.”

It’s a theory Clarke hasn’t entertained and won’t be entertaining any time soon. Religion isn’t a fallback; things are dangerous when it becomes one.

“Where is he now?”

“No idea,” she looks up to him, is surprised to see him just as focused on their hands as she is. They’re kind of shaping a peach stone, one that, if Clarke wriggled all the way down to look through, she’d be able to see him on the other side. The nail of his middle finger dawdles down the inside of her ring finger, pulling their palms closer with the touch, making her feel like someone is prodding the divot in her back. “One of the commanders had to come down and take care of it. We thought she brought him down here, but…”

But he’s not here. And there aren’t many places to hide someone in one building trying to carry hundreds.

“Does that seem a little sick to you?” she hums, shifting towards him to protect their hands.

“What? Killing someone off because they fall out of line? It’s horrific,”

“That guy probably needed help,” and there was no one here to give it to him. No one who actually could.

“This whole place is fucked,” Bellamy whispers, tucking his thumb around hers, another shield that carries no weight to it at all. “All those kids are being raised by ghosts.”

His head is up higher than hers is, just a little, just enough that if he were to speak loudly, she’d feel it against her nose.

“It’s hard to be mad at people who can’t handle this,” Clarke decides. “It’s not like they’re the ones who are messed up in here.” She taps at her forehead with her other hand to make her point.

“You’re not messed up,” he says, hold tightening.

“Bellamy, I sleep ten hours a week,” she leaves out the graphic details of her nightmares, because he’s already been around her sleeping, out in the stop for ‘rest’. It’s not a huge problem: there are worse things she’s had to deal with. Like watching him lie unconscious without the certainty that he was going to wake up.

He’s quiet for a while, letting them both relish in the shade of this room, and the impelling nature of skin against skin. She folds her fingers down, links them around his, lets him know that it’s okay. That it isn’t a burden he has to carry.

Time must be feeling kind today. Maybe generosity belongs to time, because a long period passes before Bellamy breathes in deeply, and before Clarke raises an eyebrow to hear what he’s about to say.

“You ever play video games as a kid?” he asks, out of the blue, simple and endearing and he knows just how much she needs conversation like this with that ridiculously shy smile on his face, like he is being granted something here, now, like he knows value and how to cherish whatever it is.

Clarke thinks he is beautiful.

“Not really. Me and my dad would play that old fighting one, the one from the eighties?”

“Street fighter?”

“Yeah,” Clarke grins, glad he’s able to remember something she couldn’t. “But he’d always play with the same damn character and he’d use the exact same moves in a row just because he knew I couldn’t figure out how to beat them. We had to get rid of it when I threw a controller at his head.”

In her defense, it was a really light one. Bellamy doesn’t seem to care either way, he still laughs.

“What about you?” she asks back, embarrassingly internally proud that she made him laugh.

“Well we didn’t get a T.V. until I was twelve, and even then it wasn’t one we could play games on. There was an arcade a few blocks down from us, but the machines were all rigged, and O only ever wanted to play that one with the claw,”

“Yeah?” Clarke smiles, trying to picture it. She wriggles a little closer, just for the sake of it.

“Yeah. She spent a whole week’s paycheck in there one weekend when they filled it up with care bear stuffed animals,”

Something ringing very similar to nostalgia flares up in Clarke’s chest.

“Oh, I used to love care bears,” she sighs, eyes squeezed tight.

“Really?” he’s got one eyebrow unhinged when she glances up, nothing but amusement between the two of them.

“You’re surprised?”

“Well you’re not exactly…”

“What?”

Bellamy decides against it, and Clarke doesn’t let herself get distracted by the way he bites on his lip to keep from speaking. The tips of her fingers graze his palm.

“No, say it,” she shakes her head against the pillow, making some of her hair fall into her face. “I’m not what?”

“You’re not soft,” he says, still simpering, refusing to look Clarke in the eye but she doesn’t mind. If he finds their hands so interesting, it doesn’t change anything.

“Everyone is soft when they’re six,”

“I wasn’t,”

“You definitely were,”

Bellamy just smiles. Clarke remembers the first time she let herself look at him properly, when they fell over one another in the middle of acres of fog, how she thought his face seemed aged, worn. He’s still got that vaguely crooked nose, scars around his mouth from a childhood that didn’t know the meaning of bubble wrap, but he looks young. Bellamy looks like he’s got years and years of life left to live, and there is shadow on his jaw that looks soft but will be scratchy to the touch.

Clarke watches him watch her link their hands together properly. She’s never picked up on how oily his eyelids look, never noticed how much a small detail like that matters.

“I’ve missed this,” Bellamy whispers, barely moving his lips. Clarke wants to move closer, but their hands are in the middle of the two of them. They are holding hands wrong, she wants to say. Two of her fingers are in the space between two of his, one of his fingers is down between their palms, his thumb is on the outside when his pinky is too.

They could talk to one another for forever, endless sleepless nights, days of driving with his feet on the dash, hours of hiking and running and building fires together. She was good at building fires with him.

“You have?”

Clarke refuses to let it hurt, how surprised she is by him saying that. She’s just so used to having those thoughts inside of her own head, is used to not voicing it because she simply can’t. No, not simply. Not simply at all.

“Yeah,” he nods, still biting his lip. “I really have.”

“Me too,”

“You know when people say that thing, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone?”

“Sure?”

“I’ve never had a lot. I mean I only got a bank account when I was twenty four, and everything my mom tried to give to us ended up fading to dust. And when I met you, and Raven and Murphy, I thought I could understand how special that was. But I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.”

She nods lightly. So does he; no more words required. She gets him, he gets her, that is something that can be simple. Clarke wonders how anyone can think that this is a world that holds purgatory. Misery exits, it’ll always exist, that doesn’t make it everything and that doesn’t make it something to be afraid of. Clarke has survived with the promise of bravery, and she doesn’t mind if Bellamy can never love her like he did before she died, if that beacon of romance was attached to a lighthouse that turns itself around to shelter not just the sea, but its space of land as well. If being in love can only be a memory for the two of them, she’ll cherish the memory.

There’s something between them so much more definite than love. Love is youth in comparison to the ages shaped to a peach stone.

“How long do we have?” he asks, which means ‘how long until you need to go?’

‘Forever’ she wants to tell him, because it doesn’t feel like a lie. And it doesn’t feel naïve either.

“A couple of hours,”

“Okay,”

It’s okay.

Time is sat, clasped in the space between their pointed toes, and he is watching the two of them in envy. Envy that Clarke thinks is a little ridiculous, considering how he gets to control forever, and they don’t. But time is quiet, and frozen over, and a couple of hours isn’t his, it is theirs.

“Okay,”

 

…

 

The alarm is something she’s cursed more times than she could ever count, but the mellow beeping of her watch raises the hair on Clarke’s arm when it goes off at eight.

She skipped getting food, much to Bellamy’s chagrin, but there was no way she was going to lose a moment like this. Talking shit for hours with him is probably more productive than anything else could have been today, and he rolls his face into his pillow once she’s snoozed it for the third time.

“I’ll be fine to walk, just let me tag along,” he says into the material, his ear so close to Clarke’s mouth that she can only whisper.

“Tomorrow,” she grins, trying not to get any closer because the corner of his jaw is almost irresistible. “Harper wants to drop in tonight.”

“Okay?”

“Don’t be so surprised,” Clarke rolls her eyes; of course he has no idea of the effect he has on people. “She was hitting on you for like a week.”

“She was?” he asks, more confused than anything else.

“I’ll see you later, Bell.”

“Bye Clarke.”

 

…

 

Roan decides to send Raven and Octavia out, noticeably leaving Clarke from the line up again. She wonders when will be the next time she gets to fight on either of their shoulders, has started to crave escape in that cumulative way again. He isn’t leaving with them, and they set out three hours after the huddle has been dismissed, when Clarke is due to be stationed at the gates.

“Will you tell Bell for me?” Octavia asks her when they’re loading the rover. “He’ll just freak out if I do it.”

“What makes you think he won’t freak out on me?”

“He will,” she shrugs her shoulders, tucking her pants into her boots.

“Right,” Clarke doesn’t even bother putting up a fight to it, too occupied with the knowledge that they’re heading down to Oregon just for food supplies. “Look after yourself. Both of you.”

“We’ll be back before you know it,”

“Just be careful,”

“Yes Ma’am,” Raven salutes, bent wrist and slack shoulders.

Clarke swallows her pride and hugs the both of them before they pile into the back of the rover. Roan pulls the lever to let them go, and Clarke also swallows the words she wants to spill about her need to get out soon. She knows it is not how he would choose to do this, knows he isn’t the one she has to take this up with, and will not blame someone she trusts for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'When you're in the room, I want you to stay,'  
> \- So Long, Honey, Caamp  
> (one of my favourite songs at the minute- I'm so glad I could include it)


	40. Hold you until I hold you right

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a trigger warning for this chapter at the bottom. I didn't want to spoil anything but if you are sensitive about certain topics, please double check.  
> Also, your comments have been lovely to read! Thank you!

Clarke has to shoot tonight. There are two figures approaching the walls, and shadow is setting enough that she has to hesitate for longer than she would want to. They are walking with hunched backs, but they are quieter than walkers tend to be.

She only realizes why when it is too late; they’re both missing the parts of their faces where sound would come out of, the bottom halves bitten off so violently that the mouths don’t exist. They are on her side, and they are close enough to see her through the mess of the fencing, so she doesn’t wait around any longer to kill them both, arrows flying cleaner every time she shoots.

Roan takes off halfway through her shift, when it is still hot enough to feel overdressed in track pants, and she doesn’t mind being alone for an hour or two. It is the same, just quieter. It’s not like they ever stand close enough to have an actual conversation anyway.

Something crawls up her arm when someone starts talking though, when an all too familiar voice sounds from an area nowhere near far enough away.

“Nice,” Cage smirks, taking Clarke in, perhaps not having seen her since she has chosen to stand between the spotlights. She glances around out of surprise, and swallows thickly when she sees the shotgun in his hand, one with too long a barrel, one that will make too much noise if he tries to shoot it.

“What are you doing here?” she asks through gritted teeth, pulling the string of her bow tighter to her cheek, so that it is cutting into it a little. She knows she’ll loosen it once she has acclimatized to his presence. For now, the tension needs to be poured into something.

“Roan needed the numbers,”

She doesn’t know what he means until he takes up a position at the wall, pointing the aim of the gun through one of the gaps in it. He should be spaced out further, much further, if he is doing what Clarke thinks he’s doing.

“He what?”

“You guys are a dying breed. With Sterling dead and your knight shot down, he needed to call in the big guns,”

Clarke wonders if he knows his gun is a runt in comparison to the ones the others handle, or if he is speaking metaphorically. She wonders if he knows what a metaphor actually is.

“He’s not out,” she growls.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve been recruited,”

“Not by Roan though,”

There is no way she’s going to let him spread the rumor that Roan was the one who got him on the Ark.

“What makes you say that?”

“You don’t even know how to hold that thing right,”

He cocks the gun, as though that might prove something to her. She can’t wait to see it ricochet in his arms, to hit him in the face. She wouldn’t mind seeing him bruise.

“My father is a commander,” he reminds her, as though he doesn’t shove it down her throat each time they see one another. “Roan does as he says.”

“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” That slimy voice is back, the one that makes Clarke feel as though his shoulder is rubbing up against hers and backing her into a wall. “Hours out here in the dark, can’t all be that bad with company like this.”

“Yeah,” she scoffs, wishing she could be holding a weapon that doesn’t force her to face him head on. “These nights all turn into one big orgy. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do.”

“A woman after my own heart,” he says it licking his lips, completely missing the sarcasm.

“There’s usually not this much talking,”

“Right, because of all the sex?”

Clarke ignores him because there probably won’t ever be something she could say to him where his response doesn’t make her skin crawl. She can tell when he gets bored, because he turns his back to the gate and doesn’t even try to make it look like he is working.

He hasn’t worked towards anything in the time that Clarke has known him, so she has no idea why he is starting now. It is ignorable until something sounds from the other side of the wall, and Clarke steps closer to find where it’s coming from.

They can’t have flood lights on the outside, for obvious reasons, but with everything behind her illuminated and everything in front in sheer darkness, clinging to the groaning getting closer is the only way to shoot accurately.

So when Cage starts firing his relic, the sound of it loud enough to wake the dead, she’s about ready to hit him in the face. He shoots twice, and it is easy to hear the bullets hit the ground; they were never going to land anywhere else.

It only angers whatever is approaching, and she has to work double-time to keep the roaming walker at a safe distance, shooting at something that she would normally have to shoot moving at half the speed. If Clarke were worried about her own ability to keep them back, she’d say something, but when another zombie charges toward her from the shadows, and Cage obviously misses, she is too focused on killing it herself.

“Holy shit,” Cage says, barely seconds after she has fired the third arrow, not waiting around to listen for anymore, not bothered at all about the sound. “That’s so hot.”

She can feel her cheeks flaming against the tight press of her bowstring.

She doesn’t say anything, too busy watching out for the crumbs that he is letting fall through the gaps.

“Where’d a girl like you learn to do that anyway?”

“A girl like me?” she bites, eyes closed to channel the howls too far away to be a threat.

He’s getting closer, still unsatisfied with the monotony of guarding. If he were to stick is foot out from where he’s got a shoulder pressed against the wall, he’d manage to kick Clarke in the leg. She can smell his breath from here, debating in her own head whether it is just the bodies left to rot outside or him. It is him, she realizes, as he gets closer.

“You know,” he says, smiling, eyes roaming over her face as she refuses to look away from her watch, from the line of her arrow. “Small, pretty. It’s not like you need to be able to do that.”

“I don’t know,” she drawls, hardening as he steps forward again, his shoulder making a rustling sound against the wall that makes the hairs on her arm rise. “It comes in pretty handy with unwanted advances.”

“I heard your father was some military big shot,”

“Don’t speak about my father,”

“Was he the one who taught you?”

“I said don’t speak about my father,” she growls underneath her breath, trying to stay calm, to stay civil. Starting a fight out here, with a man like Cage, isn’t worth it. She’ll draw the line at him trying to worm his way under her skin though, trying to pretend that he could ever understand what she has dealt with, what she has been through.

“Jeez,” he laughs, holding his hands up, a smirk on his face that reads cockiness and unpleasantness, like he thinks he is seeing something that she can’t see. “I’m just asking. No need to be so uptight.”

He takes another step, toes pointed as though it will make the advance unnoticeable.

Cage lowers his voice, can do that now, with their narrowing proximity.

“Blake not screwing you right?”

Her eyes snap to his, the string of her bow falling slack, the arrow between her fingers spinning to sit in her fist. Fuck civility.

“Shut your mouth,”

He tuts his teeth, purses his lip to the side in thought. Clarke has seen that look in his eyes before.

“We all know the sex is shitty when you have to stoop below the poverty line. Nothing for you to be ashamed of Clarke,” he pats her on the shoulder, all camaraderie, if it weren’t for the hunger he is letting grow. No, it’s not hunger. Hunger would imply he is being deprived of something. It’s just greed. His hand doesn’t fall back from her arm. “We’ve all made mistakes.”

There is danger in the air that wasn’t here two minutes ago. She has got an arrow in hand, the head of it pointed behind her, but the instinct to fight isn’t here. They are too hidden, too buried in a space abandoned by the spotlights, and she just wants out.

“You want to know what I think?” Cage asks, peeling himself from off the wall and walking around, enclosing her so that she is forced to press her back to it. “I think you need to spend some time with a man, one who can last at least a few months without getting shot.”

He says it as though Bellamy is weak for what happened to him. He couldn’t be further from the truth. He couldn’t be more _wrong_.

“Get away from me Cage,” she warns him, scared of the power she knows she has in comparison to him. She could drive the arrow six inches into his neck before he even realized what was happening. She could walk away from his body like it is just another one of the corpses that she has shot down tonight, only a foot of partition to distinguish the two.

His smell becomes so strong that Clarke’s stomach lets her know there is acid trapped inside of her body, would be ready to release it if it wanted to. His knee touches hers. She has never thought about the things her knee could feel before, but here it is, calling for attention.

“Don’t be frightened Clarke,” he coos, his hand coming to do what it did last time, to wrap around her own and drive his fingers into her palm, perhaps beyond his intention. It is cold out here too. “He won’t find us out here. You don’t have to worry about him interrupting the two of us again.”

“I said no,”

“I’ll take care of you,” his fingers wrap around her wrist. Even if she wanted to use the arrow now, she couldn’t. It’d be useless. “I can teach you to loosen up,” he presses in, wanting Clarke to feel him. The dark is a threat with him. “It’ll feel so good, I promise,”

She is frozen until his head tilts to the side. Until she sees not just his body, but his face accelerating towards hers, and the ice of it all really sets in. Clarke uses her bow as a lever, driving it between the two of them and wrenching her hand back to break free from his hold.

Her watch was supposed to be over in an hour anyway, and there is no way she’s sticking around with that burned into her skin. She takes off, not running, not giving him the thrill of seeing her run. Cage calls her name into the night, and she lets it float away. He is not going to chase after her, not when she goes out of her way to make sure that she isn’t diverging from the stream of the floodlights.

Clarke finds momentary solace in the ground floor of the building, when the entrance is behind her shoulder, and she doesn’t consider where to go before she’s tumbling down the stairs to the infirmary.

It is too late for Bellamy to still be up, too early for there to be a chance of him starting to wake, but she needs to be around someone who doesn’t have to pretend to be a good person, to be worth the valuable chance at life that they’re given. She needs to be around someone who can make her feel safe, make her feel like nothing will turn to shit if she takes the metal rod out of her shoulders.

Clarke shuts the door behind her, with surprising control considering her hands are actually shaking, and the sheer weight of it, but the only other person here is a medic that Clarke doesn’t recognize from back here, because there’s always someone on station.

Bellamy is asleep and alone, the candles around his bed blown out while there are still some scattered around the hall.

Stepping closer stops the blood from rushing through her veins so vividly, and there is air in here untainted by the infection. And Bellamy is here. Which, regardless of everything else, just simply helps.

She takes her seat at the side of his bed, not willing to jump into his next to him without his permission, but doesn’t hesitate to pull it higher.

Clarke realizes she has her bow with her when she tries to lie down and realizes she can’t do it without spilling her arrows out over her head. Bellamy would laugh if he were awake, so she laughs for him when she takes it off from around her shoulder, tucks both the bow and the quiver under the chair, where she’ll probably forget about them in the morning.

She lays her head on to the mattress just below Bellamy’s pillow, an inch from his shoulder, an arm underneath her as another lift. She is barely able to close her eyes before he shifts.

“Clarke,” he hums. She would guess he’s dreaming if it weren’t for the way his eyebrows raise softly, waiting for something.

She rockets up, scared to have woken him up, even if the damage has already been done.

“Where are you?”

“I’m right here, Bell,”

“You’re not here,” he mumbles, probably waning between sleep and out of it. He pats the other side of him, knowing that she should be on that one if he is going to face her like he did earlier.

Clarke doesn’t feel weird for smiling as she stands to her feet and rounds the bed, and when he opens the blanket for her to crawl under, there is no overthinking before she climbs in. Bellamy is already turning on to his side by the time Clarke has the blanket over her shoulder, kicking her shoes off at the edge of it to tumble to the ground.

It is so dark she can barely make out the divot of his nose, or the sleepy heaviness of his eyes.

He wraps an arm around her waist, probably not quite aware of what he’s doing, and it is only to pull her closer into him, to let her know that she shouldn’t be afraid of being like this, and then his hand is falling awkwardly to his own side again.

Clarke does what she has been procrastinating wanting to do: moves her leg forward and lets his foot fold over hers. She is a breath away on his pillow.

“Are you okay?” Bellamy asks, with his eyes closed.

She nods, because he’s not going to see it, and she doesn’t want to lie outright to him.

Her silence sobers him, and she sees his eyes catch light that comes from nowhere like they always do.

“Hey,” he whispers, so softly. “What is it?”

Maybe it is just clear on her face, the effect that Cage has on her when he is like that. They are all so used to talking about him like he’s just a pest, like something they have got to learn to live with anyway, they may as well make a joke of it. That back there, didn’t feel like a joke. And it might not be something she can ignore.

And if anyone can see that on her, it’s going to be Bellamy. Maybe the blotchiness of her cheeks is still there, or maybe it’s the way her eyes have probably grown ten times bigger with all of the tension and pressure and forced neutrality.

But she has heard stories of Bellamy’s mother and the men she had to deal with. And maybe this is something similar, but Clarke feels like a child comparing the two things. She doesn’t want to make a big deal out of something that might just be an overreaction, especially not to the man who has already been scarred by a history of this.

Clarke shakes her head, because they are both tired, and Bellamy is the warmest thing known anymore, and her foot is sandwiched between both of his, and his fingers are tapping the space beneath his wound because they are waiting to reach out. And his heart is practically beating out of his chest with the want to help her with whatever it is.

So Clarke tucks her forehead into the center of his collar bone, glazing the edge of his t-shirt thin enough to curve around him and not hide him away.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she admits, wants to put her hand to his chest too, to balance everything out. Is touching like that too much though? Are her dawdling fingers just as nervous, just as uncertain?

Will he be offended if she braced herself against the top of his ribcage, if she skirted the bandage and nestled into the loosened part of him?

Bellamy decides to cut that barrier with the swing of his heavy arm, taking her waist back and pressing his palm to her lower back. It’s so innocent, and his shirt is so soft, that Clarke wants to just cry for a while. It’d soak up her tears and make it look like nothing happened.

She wraps her arm around him too, careful not to hurt him, careful not to move him, careful not to breathe him in too much because it is sort of addictive.

“I’ve got you,” Bellamy says, voice thick with sleep, his fingers spreading to let Clarke know that she’s being held. “Whenever you’re ready.”

She wonders what he means by that, but is too tired to figure anything out from it. She doesn’t care if it is something wider or if it is exactly as it is spoken.

“You too,” she mumbles back, liking the sound of it anyway, submitting to the shadow of sleep and letting the smell of honey carry her away.

“Huh?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

 

…

 

Clarke wakes up higher up than she was when she fell asleep. Bellamy has brought her up to him, and she regains consciousness with the brush of his nose against hers. She feels herself lean into it before she realizes how close they actually are, and jerks her head back, eyes blinking forcefully, not having woken up this close to someone since, well, him.

He’s still asleep and she can’t bring herself to break the circle he has formed around her waist, so Clarke turns her head and lies flat on her back so that she doesn’t get blindsided by someone sat at the bed again.

She is so occupied with the relief of no one being right here to catch the two of them like this, that it takes a while to see Wells over at the med station, distracted with moving some supplies around, too distracted to seem like he is actually paying attention to them.

When he does look over, Clarke will pretend not to have seen him at all, too riddled with the feeling that her brother has just caught her cuddling with her… person.

Bellamy in the morning, or whatever time it is, is a different kind of Bellamy than most people know him to be. He rests with a slowness that is subtly vulnerable, and the expanse of his muscle feels softer to the touch than it does when they are say, gripping on to one another outside of a zombie-ridden hotel, or grappling for control when they are ‘fighting’.

Memories of Cage towering over her drift back in, in the way that bruises form the next morning. There is no way his responsibilities can go any further than replacement for the actually capable members of the Ark, there is no way she could ever trust him with her life like she would with Roan, or with Miller. Like she has done with them.

She closes her eyes when Bellamy stirs, and she definitely is not going to be that person to get caught watching the other one sleep.

He squeezes her waist before he detaches himself, arms slipping out so as not to wake her, like he thinks he has made a mistake. Clarke can’t stand the thought of him regretting keeping her close, so she wriggles a little closer, shifting down to fit to his neck.

The lump in his throat moves, his chin dropping a little against her head like he is trying to breathe shallowly, nervously. It comes out shaky, and Clarke rubs the tip of her nose to his skin, saying he is wanted.

“Don’t wake up yet,” she mumbles against him, his Adam’s apple grazing her lip.

She can feel the way his smile forms, even if she can’t see it.

“Are we staying here forever?” he asks, with that oh so heavy voice that gives her air in the morning. Clarke isn’t sure if he is trying to make her laugh when he ducks his face so low that it is able to slide in between hers and the pillow, or if it is just to get closer.

The rough, thickened stubble rising up his cheeks tickles her skin, and he might not know how much she has missed feeling him like this.

“No,” she says as he hides his face beneath hers, hides from light and seeks shelter in space that isn’t there. “So don’t wake up yet.”

He does as she asks, or tries his best at least, squeezing her gently and staying exactly where he is. Neither of them go back to sleep though, instead, both just enjoying the moment of quiet, and the new but familiar feeling of being this close to someone again. Of being this close to each other.

Clarke wants to put her hand in his too-long hair, but that might be too much for now. Instead she tucks her nose into his neck and relishes in how much she fits to him.

“Are you okay now?” he asks quietly sometime later, letting her know that he hasn’t forgotten last night.

The week between now and when he was last on solid ground with his own safety must be feeling like months to him, and she has been wondering when he would start worrying about everyone else again. When he would give up on keeping his fretting quiet in favor of complaining about his injury.

Clarke guesses that time is up.

“Yeah,” she hums, pinching the black fabric of his shirt between her fingers.

“You can go back to sleep if you’d like,”

“No,” Clarke tells herself, knowing her own limits, knowing that if he tells her things like that, she’ll follow along. “Come on, you seriously need a shower.”

It’s probably strange, how much she likes the smell of him as they are. Maybe she has become immune to sweat like she has her own, after living wild for so long, but all she smells is him, and it’s only getting stronger each day. But he’ll be fidgety until he at least tries to walk again, and she is sort of desperate to cut his hair.

“What?” he asks, a couple of seconds behind as she extracts herself from their jumble of arms and legs. She doesn’t go so far as to stray from the pillow, just enough that she is level with his face, a few inches between their noses.

“A shower?” she says slowly, to remind him that they are a thing that exist. “I know for a fact there’s one on this floor.”

Bellamy looks between the two of them, narrowed eyes.

“You want to…?” he doesn’t even finish the question, too scared to get something wrong.

“Well it’s me or Wells,” Clarke pulls herself upright, rubs her arms as she does so to replace some of the warmth she is leaving behind. She plasters a smirk over her face to mask the nervousness building: it’s an awkward situation, but it’s not like he can do it on his own right now. She nods over to the med station, the one holding her oblivious best friend. There is no way he’d go for that, that much is clear from the way Bellamy sits up brusquely, ruling that out for himself. “I can go get Murphy if you want? I’m sure he’d be happy to-”

“Okay,” he gives, rolling his eyes.

Clarke doesn’t wait around in jumping up, reaching down for her boots and lacing them up in bunny ear loops, too lazy to double knot them. She is just looking forward to seeing Bellamy up again, seeing him be comfortable with doing something for himself. This is a step towards it at least.

Standing him to his feet is awkward, as she expected it to be. She catches Wells’ eye from across the lengthy aisle, not asking his permission to do this, but just checking to see if it is a good idea. She can’t read him well from back here, but he doesn’t look like he is against moving Bellamy about. He looks like he is smiling, but it’s smaller than it usually is. It’s a smile that seems stolen, one that shouldn’t be his regardless of it branded to his attire.

Clarke understands. He has never seen the person she lets herself be around Bellamy. She’s excited about introducing him to her, to a lighter, better person.

“Fucking painkillers,” Bellamy growls into her ear when they are both up, her arm under both of his shoulders. He is leaning on her perhaps a little more than she can take, and they are definitely tilted to one side. He speaks tightly, stopping himself from breathing to stop his chest from moving. “I think they’re just crushing paracetamol and hoping I don’t notice.”

Clarke scoffs as she adjusts to the breadth of his torso. The height difference doesn’t make this any easier. He is actively trying not to crush her, which makes this all the more absurd.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she grins, nodding over at Wells with her teeth flashing, him raising his eyebrows in question. Even if he were standing right next to them, she wouldn’t be able to explain why she is smiling so ridiculously. “You alright?”

“I’m good,”

They walk slowly, his bare feet strange against the tiled ground, and Clarke doesn’t even surprise herself when she is the one to trip over, when he is the one to steady the both of them even with his whole body fighting the tension.

She apologizes quietly, but Bellamy only shakes his head, looks at her as though if she hadn’t tripped, he’d have felt weird. Idiot.

The room that she stayed in is a few corridors down, and there was a group of showers some doors away from it, she guesses the only ones on this floor. Clarke takes him to them using muscle memory, his weight heavy, her anxiety about hurting him worsening with each step forward.

Bellamy never makes it obvious that she is hurting him. He grunts occasionally, throws himself around like a person does to make a baby sit right in their arms, and Clarke knows that he is only doing it to give her some momentary reprieve.

It isn’t uncomfortable. It is bearable weight. It is something Clarke cherishes having as a responsibility, and she watches their feet to make sure her clunky, relic boots aren’t about to crush his toes. He has got strange feet, Clarke notices. She has seen him without shoes on before, obviously, but she’s never taken the time to look at his feet.

They’re quite asymmetrical, and his second toes are longer than his big ones. The track pants trail past his heels.

Slowly, as he gets used to walking again, Bellamy eases off of her. She’s still here, but it’s more as a crutch, less as a mechanism. She’s not surprised that he is already mostly carrying himself; he is more of a fighter than people like to see.

Clarke flicks the switch to the dingy bathroom, in an even worse state than the one on Ark floor considering how often it’s actually used. She’s sure it’s saved for people kept in the infirmary, so she was probably the last one to come in here.

There are three showers along the opposite wall, where a window could be if they weren’t underground, all barred by white shower curtains that are raised a foot from the impossibly wet tiles.

The cup that she kept a toothbrush in is still here, but the toothbrush isn’t, so it’s a good thing she pocketed the spare at the bottom of the bedside cabinet.

When they don’t have to do much more walking, she unwraps herself from Bellamy, and turns to face him instead, walking backwards toward the shower so that she doesn’t have to look at them, so that she doesn’t have to think about what this is going to be.

Bellamy looks just as uncertain, amusement remaining because that tiny smile hasn’t left his expression in days, but apprehensive and his eyes darting around to take the room in.

Clarke knows he’s going to struggle getting his shirt off, given the noises he made when he had to raise his arms higher than his shoulders before. She doesn’t want to just reach for it, but she’s not sure what else to do, and waiting around feels worse.

She clears her throat, bringing his attention back to her, and Clarke holds her hands out, meaning to gesture for the edges of his t-shirt so that he gets the message. He doesn’t: Bellamy just looks at Clarke with raised eyebrows, asking her to make things a little clearer.

She sighs heavily and waves for him to come closer; she’s got her back to the shower curtains; he’ll have to be nearer soon anyway.

“Wait,” he says, eyes wider than she has seen in a while. “You’re taking my clothes off?”

“You want to do it?” Clarke raises her eyebrow, knowing he is proud to a ridiculous extent, but surely not to this extent. She literally slept on a bed with him while he didn’t have a shirt on, it’s nothing she hasn’t seen already. It’s nothing she wouldn’t kill to see again. But this is professional.

Bellamy looks down at himself, like he is wondering if his body is actually where it is. He’ll be able to do the pants on his own, thank God, but Clarke will have to take the dressing off too.

“Bell, I’ve done this before,” she wants him to know, just to take the pressure off of this some more. “Treating patients isn’t all surgery and diagnosis. I had to deal with a lot of aftercare too.”

He still looks hesitant, and she really can’t get a read on him since he’s still got his face ducked away. She notices the pink rising up the side of his neck, seeping from the edge of his shirt’s collar.

Her voice fades down.

“I really can go and get someone else if you’d rather-”

“No,” he rushes, hands awkward by his sides. She breathes a sigh of relief when he steps closer. “Stay.”

Everything seems to slow down when Bellamy moves into her space, when his commanding presence approaches, when the specks of dust on his t-shirt come into focus. She hasn’t thought about what this actually is until it is staring her in the face, and then her cheeks feel like they are burning all over again, and she can hear him breathing above her.

Clarke notices her fingers shaking faintly, her pulse thickening in this grimy, echoed room meant for a lot more than two people. She wants to say something, to distract them both, but for the first time, nothing reaches her tongue, and her mind preoccupies itself with the ragged way his throat draws air, with the way his shoulders find a means to be so stupidly attractive. Who even finds shoulders attractive? Has that ever been a thing?

Holding on to the end of Bellamy’s shirt is supposed to anchor her to something, but it only makes Clarke feel like she is careening to the ground and she steps closer so that he’ll catch her if she does actually fall. Her fist is maybe too tight in the fabric, tighter than it would be if this were someone else, and she can feel him watching her hands as they lift slowly.

She hadn’t realized how low those pants sit on his hips, barely catching his waist, and there is something oddly endearing to it. When Clarke works on getting his arms through the sleeves, it is a short respite from the electric air, concentration taking over for a moment.

Bellamy’s neck moves fluidly, heavily, to help her get it off completely, and the seconds are stretching into minutes, the minutes fleeing through the closed door because they are the only two things that exist right now.

He is dangerously quiet, his chest frozen in place. She knows the feeling. Before moving to the bandages, Clarke’s eyes flicker up to his, to make sure he is okay with everything, with standing up for this long, with the pain, with the lack of space between the two of them.

His eyes are still wide, but they are weighted at the same time. There is a sugary glaze to them, clarity losing out against something else. He nods his head slowly, and she can see him biting the inside of his bottom lip. His bottom lip. His bottom lip.

She catches the folded edge of the gauze and unravels it with calm that is steadily dwindling. She is going to have to step closer, to wrap her arms around the entirety of his form, if she wants to keep hold of the bandage without making him turn around. She shifts it into the other hand when it meets the point of his spine, and Clarke wonders if he knows how solid his chest actually is. She wonders if he knows how strong a bullet would have to be to pass through something like this. His spine, his ribs, they could be made of steel.

She has to do the loop three times more until the strip comes away completely. She’s not sure what to do with it now, so screws it up and pockets it which feels more intimate than it should. There is a thicker dressing exposed now, over the place where his kidney would be theoretically, if the bullet passed through that far. It is being held down by surgical tape, segments cut smaller than they should have been, but it is a finite medical resource.

His feet shuffle on the floor. He’s not backing away. With the layer of bandaging gone, his abdomen is fully out, and the bricks layered upon one another are spaced out by grooves that make them look like they are defying gravity. She doesn’t have abs. She is fighting fit and she’s happy with the shape of her body, the way her waist curves now, but she is not a model and she never would have been.

Bellamy is like something out of a magazine, those black and white photos of the guys with not an ounce of gel in their hair, pale shirt opened up with obvious discretion. She wonders how those contours have shaped to one another so perfectly, and then she remembers she should be doing something.

Clarke peels back the tape, lets the more compressed square of meshed fabric fall away. There is no blood on it, but she’s pretty certain it won’t be kept.

The wound is crescent shaped, a line of his skin that is rough because those two parts are only now learning each other. There are crisscrosses that look like shoelaces along it, latticed and tight. There’s no anger around them, no redness, just shading. The line is more tanned, darker, because of the youth of the injury.

She is scared to touch it, but it is something she hates and admires all at once. Instead, Clarke reaches her hand forward tentatively, fingers bent inward, and the way she touches a spot about three inches away from the wound is probably not even worth calling a touch.

The sound of him breathing in helps take a chunk out of the solid air, and she doesn’t want to move away at all. Clarke doesn’t know why there is space between their bodies at all. The heat in the air definitely isn’t a product of the sun, and he is tall enough that her head fits beneath his chin when she is looking down.

“You look good,” she says, her voice not quite sounding like her voice. She realizes her mistake the second it leaves her mouth. “I mean you look better. The gun. The bullet. Wound. It’s healing and that’s good.”

She closes her eyes and tries to think of a time she has made more of a fool of herself. There isn’t one that springs to mind. Bellamy breathes a laugh through his nose, his chest jumping before it stills.

“Professional,” he says, the first time he’s spoken in what feels like hours. His voice doesn’t quite sound like his either.

“In my defense,” she swallows, eyes still shut to will away the blush. “I never graduated.”

“Mhm,” he just hums, his whole body rocking forward like he is only stood on the balls of his feet.

Clarke hasn’t taken her hand away from his chest, and her other one feels useless where it is, so she balances her middle finger along the vertical line that divides his torso in half. There’s no excuse for it. She’s not sure there needs to be one.

He’s not watching her hands anymore. She has gotten pretty good at knowing where the heat of his gaze stems from, and there’s a burning sensation rising along her jawline. She is surprised when her toes start to lift her up, knowing that moving through the crushing air requires strength.

It might be his magnet. The one they haven’t acknowledged.

‘I’m terrified,’ she wants to tell him. ‘I’m scared in a way I couldn’t be before’.

_I am scared of how brave you make me feel._

“Shower,” he clears his throat as he talks, making Clarke jump so much that her hands fall away from him.

“Shower,” she nods, eyes lifted to the ceiling. “Go for it.”

She gestures to them as though he wouldn’t know where they are and turns her back immediately afterwards, not prepared to see him undress completely in front of her.

“I can wait out here?” Clarke asks him, practically throwing herself over to the far wall, her arms folded over her chest. It’d probably be easier- for her- if she could leave, but the med ward is enough of a walk away that he shouldn’t have to do it on his own just yet.

“Um, I haven’t got anything clean to change into,” Bellamy says awkwardly, like he doesn’t want to have to ask at all.

Okay. She can do that. Octavia brought some of his clothes down and packed them away in the cupboard; she can just run and get them.

“Sure,” is all she says, opening the door and escaping out of it before he can add anything else.

Her heart is already pounding out of her chest, she doesn’t want to worsen it by jogging over to the infirmary, so she stumbles idly towards it and tries to quench the dryness rising through her throat.

By the time she gets back to the bathroom, the curtain is pulled, and the shower is on, and Clarke waits, leaning all of her weight against the wall next to the door, basketball shorts that belonged to someone she’ll never meet folded in her hands, and a weakness in her knees that is asking her if it can stay.

 

…

 

“Hey Wells, I’m picking Murphy up for some food, you want to come?” she asks, a couple of hours later, after her and Bellamy have killed time, sat cross legged on top of his covers, a noticeable foot between the two of them, both leaning in and laughing inappropriately for people in their mid-twenties.

He has asked if he can go up to the mess; Wells said tomorrow. She knows why: he’s seen what happens when someone who is not ready is discharged. She fainted because of it.

“You’re good. I’ve got an hour left on my shift,” he says casually.

“Want me to wait?”

“When are you working?”

“Four,”

“Go,”

“You’re sure?” part of her wants an excuse to stay.

“I’m sure,” he smirks, catching her out on it even if it is unspoken.

Clarke wanders back over to Bellamy, who has one of her arrows in his hand, stolen from the quiver hidden underneath his bed.

He looks up as she approaches, a pout to his lips, a simplicity to his defeat.

“Alright soldier,” she swings her quiver over her head, ducking under the strap, ignoring his smirk when it hits the back of her head. “Give.”

“You can’t spare one?” Bellamy asks lightly, clutching it tighter to his body.

“You aren’t keeping it,”

“Just one?”

Clarke rolls her eyes, knew as soon as he took it that he wouldn’t give it back without a struggle. She folds a leg under herself as she takes a seat next to him, chin leaning on her own shoulder. He can read what she is planning on doing before she’s even figured it out, so he angles away from her as far as possible, holding his arm out so that she can’t reach it.

If he can stretch like that, he is definitely healing. Healing enough that Clarke doesn’t feel bad about crawling along his shoulder, her own arm straight to try to grab at the arrow.

Bellamy is laughing beneath her, grumbling when she puts a hand on his ear to climb over him some more. She tries her best to ignore the amusement of it all, game face on. She is glad she hasn’t picked up her bow yet, knows using him as a climbing frame with it in her hand would probably end up hurting one of them.

“You are-” she breathes, her cheeks actually hurting from smiling so much. “Such a child.”

She shoves at his head, pushing him down to the pillow to get closer, but Bellamy loops an arm around her waist to keep her in place. It’s not like _that_ , she thinks for the instant she has to recover, it is tactical.

He pulls her into his side, both of them landing on the pillow so hard that the mattress squeaks, and her face ends up tucked against his shoulder. She feels like a koala bear and isn’t opposed to it at all.

She feels the stretch of his smile from all the way over here, how it radiates triumph obnoxiously. The sound of something light hitting the floor off to the side rings out, and when Bellamy swings his other arm to wrap around her, to pull her even closer to him, she realizes what he was trying to do all along.

“You’re just trying to get me to stay,” she laughs into his shoulder, hides her face from everything but his shoulder.

“Obviously,” he doesn’t sound at all apologetic. “Time sucks without you here.”

“It does?” she simpers, glad he can’t see her.

She hates how he can say things like that as though they’re flippant, as though they’re obvious. As though the only reason he is saying them at all is because he likes to say them.

He has got her shirt bunched up in his fists, a slither of skin exposed. Everything feels like a live wire.

“I’d stay if I could,”

“I know,”

“Bell?”

“Hmm?”

“This is when you’re supposed to let me go,” her mouth twists around itself. His circle doesn’t break. “Bellamy Blake.”

“Princess?” he mumbles, smug smile carried through miles that aren’t dividing them anymore. She gives herself five minutes more.

 

…

 

Murphy is already walking towards her when Clarke leans against the doorway to the entrance of the building.

“Clarke Griffin,”

“You hungry?”

“Sure,” he doesn’t gesture for her to go first, so she ends up knocking into his shoulder when they both try to fit through at the same time.

There are no stairs to climb, just a few corridors to wind down to get to the mess hall.

“I’m supposed to be mad at you,” she says, wincing slightly, trying to figure out which way will be the quickest to wrap this up. “I _am_ mad at you.”

Murphy keeps looking ahead of him, expression neutral.

“Okay?”

“You didn’t tell me that he stayed. Or that you tried to get rid of him. _Or_ that my mother told him he had no right to be in my life,”

“To be fair,” he narrows his eyes, lips twisting to stop from smirking. At least he knows that’s something he shouldn’t be doing, even if he is doing it. “We only found out about that a couple days ago.”

“Murphy,” she snaps, not willing to give in to that. He knows he screwed up.

“I was ashamed Clarke. I said some really shitty things. And he did too. It was ugly on all sides,”

“You still should have told me,”

“Yeah I know,”

“And I swear to God if you two don’t make it right-”

“Way ahead of you,” he drawls, rolling his eyes.

“You are?”

“Went and saw him yesterday. Tail between my legs and everything. The guy was willing to trade his life for mine, you know I don’t forget things like that,”

“You forgot it the first time,” Clarke shrugs, opening the doors to the dropship and letting them fall back on him for the sake of it. She thinks back to how many times Bellamy took care of them, and of him specifically. Like when Murphy fell in the river, or even getting him out of Nebraska in the first place.

“That was different,” he seems equally as nonchalant as she is being. If Bellamy and him really have cleared the air, then she is willing to let go of the grudge. He’s admitting, flat out, that he had a part to play. That’s the most she can really expect.

“How so?” she asks, smirking, ready to hear whatever bullshit he is going to try to come up with. They head over to the food counter, nodding at Jasper and Maya who are sat at Ark with Miller.

“I thought he wasn’t looking after you then,”

He doesn’t mean to make that sound like it is worth anything, but every time Murphy gives her an insight into something that isn’t snark, she gets a little thrown. Being told that she is valued, that that value actually means something, will always throw her for a loop. So she makes him plate up her food, and after that, she can’t really stay mad at him, because he could have died a few days ago, and she is not going to waste time being resentful.

 

…

 

Clarke’s watch finishes at eleven and Niylah has always been unnecessarily warm to her, so it passes by quickly; the opposite of last night’s. She freezes when she reaches the staircase, wonders which way she should be going. She went to Bellamy last night, without much of an excuse to give to him, and isn’t too sure whether she should go. She can’t remember that last time she actually spent a night in her own bed; it must have been before they left for Minnesota.

The thought of going back to a room, small enough to be a walk-in closet, four narrowing walls that don’t let any light in, is enough to remind her of the nightmares that she has been running from. It feels like they have been gone for so long, tonight isn’t the night for them to come back.

So while it may be the selfish thing to do, Clarke heads down to the infirmary. It is late enough that most people are asleep, only the few that actually need to work are up, which means she doesn’t walk past too many.

She makes a mental note to remember to ask Bellamy if she should come back next time, instead of just leaving and expecting to be wanted back.

He is up when she walks through. The way he looks towards her, the way his hand goes still in his hair, his arm bent behind his head leisurely, propping him up above those pillows that Clarke never wanted to leave.

She notices a pad of paper, folded closed over a pen on his bedside table, the same sort that her torn letter came from, and something a lot like excitement bubbles up through her at the thought of reading something else that he has written. She’ll leave it until he opens the book though, knows not to push with something like that.

“Hey,” he says quietly, not as tired as she feels, not as loud as she is used to hearing people speak.

“I didn’t know if you’d be awake,” she blurts out, walking around the bed and taking a seat at the end of it. His smile is small, amused.

“You came anyway?”

“My room is empty,”

Bellamy looks down to his lap.

“You know I prefer having you here,” he shrugs, shaking his head.

“I don’t want to be annoying,” she smiles at her own hands, knowing it sounds ridiculous.

When he looks back up, he is frowning, his eyes sticking to one place in particular over by the med station, but Clarke is caught up in the closed off hunch of his shoulders.

“Your mom’s over there,”

She looks over, and this is the first time since he was brought in that she has seen her mother, but if Abby has seen Clarke then she doesn’t show it. She has got her back to them, arm above her head to reach for something on a shelf, and Clarke looks away quicker than she looks over.

“She hasn’t said anything,”

He speaks like he is giving her a warning, like he is saying she should sneak out before her mom sees. No chance.

Clarke picks herself up from the end of his bed and settles on top of the covers, ditching one of the pillows so that she can actually lie down tonight. She makes a show of wriggling down, of getting comfortable, of making it clear that she is not going to be chased away by her own mother.

Bellamy watches her with amusement, not making a move to lie down, thinking way too much.

“She’s not going to scare me off,” Clarke says with her eyes closed. “And she’s not going to scare you off either.”

“I’m not scared,” he scoffs, still hesitating.

She wants him to know that there is nothing her mother could say that would make her opinion of him weaken, that the anger she feels for her is beyond her reach just yet.

“Seriously,” Bellamy says quietly, when she just pretends to be asleep, his arm almost brushing against her chest. “I don’t want to put you in a weird position or something.”

This isn’t going to be as easy as she wants it to be. Clarke sits up, hopes deep down that Abby has noticed the two of them, just to rub it in her face some more. She opens her eyes to see him playing with a pinched part of the blanket, rolling it between his fingers nervously. She shuffles closer to him.

“Bell,” Clarke whispers, knowing the night isn’t waiting around for the two of them. His head lifts, with effort, his gaze climbing to meet hers. “I am exactly where I want to be.”

Her eyelids are heavy, so weighted that she is looking up at him through her eyelashes, her forehead inches from his shoulder. He’s wearing green today. The green she likes.

“She doesn’t get to choose things like…”

“Things like what?” he asks, after realizing Clarke doesn’t know how to finish that. She flickers over to her mother, a woman stood upright and endlessly busy with monotony.

There is space between Clarke and Bellamy that carries tides of voltage; rare and valuable, and the distance between his chest and hers is exactly what distance should be; it is potential. Her mother doesn’t get to choose things like Clarke’s favorite color, or how many pillows she sleeps with under her head, or whether she laces her boots with a square knot or a granny knot.

“Things like this,” she answers, when the candle behind his shoulder wobbles around its axis. He is on his side, not the one through which he was shot, and Clarke is curled up all fetal towards him. If they had flashlights underneath their chins, they would be telling horror stories to one another. They would be kids beneath a Lego fort.

Bellamy shuffles down some more, giving in to her determination to stay, which he was always going to do, that same smirk on his face from when she first came in.

“Do you want to stay tonight?”

It’s a bit of a stupid question, considering her shoes are off, her bow is already tucked beneath the bed, her eyes are already locking shut. His are brown and bold; she can see forests scattered somewhere behind them. He is asking, not for him, but for her. He is asking for her permission to give her someone, in the same way that her reluctance to be anywhere else is silent admission of needing someone.

She wants to stay every night.

“Is that okay?”

They don’t touch. Not consciously. He puts his hand under the pillow like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it, like he’s holding his head up when he doesn’t even need to.

“Okay?” he asks, and Clarke has to listen to the mirth in his voice because she can’t see his lips with her eyes closed.

“Okay,” she mumbles back, embracing the way this mattress feels taller without so many pillows, the way his breathing is so much slower than hers, how his weird toes are so close to touching hers.

Some people were born to move. To wander and keep wandering, to scavenge life from as many places as they can find. Clarke is tiptoeing the line between here and sleep, her fingers anchoring her to rubble, and she barely catches the featherlight touch of Bellamy’s finger against her forehead. Her hair likes to reach for him when it is down, and sometimes it falls through her eyes to get to him, but Bellamy’s movement pushes the hair away from her face so softly that she isn’t surprised it listens to him. He only has to whisper, and she’d follow.

The breadth of his hand, how careful it is with brushing her hair back, how the whole room fades into shadow, the way Bellamy hums her name before she falls to sleep completely.

How he says ‘Princess,’- a rarity now- it makes Clarke feel like their fort is indefinite. He doesn’t call her a princess in the delicate way. He calls her princess as the fort’s leader, as the protector. His touch leaves her face as quickly as it comes, but she would rather sleep with his thumb running over her cheek so softly that it burns.

He asked her if she wants to stay tonight.

He asked her if he could be the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Hold you until I hold you right'  
> \- Lost, Dermot Kennedy
> 
> Warning: This chapter features some predatory behaviour from Cage. Clarke gets very uncomfortable. There is no actual sexual assault, but there is some threatening and distressing interaction.


	41. Run across the mustard dust sand, scream down the wind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My brain has decided to stop functioning. I feel like I should apologise, but I don't really know how to without sounding pathetic. So it's been a while since the last update, and I'm a dick. Please be gentle with the next 10000 words (and with the 125000 to follow that. Hint: no, this story will be abandoned over my dead body. Hint: a lot of effort goes into this shit.) As always, your kind words are more than I deserve.  
> -Em

“Clarke, you are aware that we aren’t making you sleep down here anymore?” Wells asks, a lot closer to her than where he should be positioned at the med station. She squints under yellowed light, wriggles into the weight on her left to hide from it.

“Do your job Golden Boy,” she grumbles, her fingers latching tighter to the fabric between them.

“I’m trying,”

“And you expect them to call you doctor,”

“It’s a little hard when my patient has a Clarke shaped vine wrapped around him,”

Clarke opens her eyes and realizes where she actually is; waking up rushing in like it’s escaping from something else. To be fair to herself, it’s not like she’s got her arm around the place that Wells would need to get to, but Bellamy is propped, sitting up, already alert and wearing a hat on his head for whatever reason.

Her forehead is pressed to his side, too high for his arm to be in anyway comfortable beneath her body. It isn’t surrounding her, but it isn’t retreating either. It is exactly what Bellamy is at the minute: too cautious to give, too self-aware to take. She looks up to him as she brews the effort to move away and he doesn’t look like he’s in a rush, or like he minds that his arm is probably so close to numb that it’ll be about ready to fall off.

He has that distractedly amused smirk on his lips, leaning them too far to one side in the way that she likes, and Wells is on his half of the bed, watching her with both eyebrows raised, his tapping shoe like a countdown.

“You could have moved me,” she sulks, not quite sure how to sit up without being obvious about how she’d been lying before. “Without waking me up.”

Bellamy breathes heavily through his nose, drawing Clarke’s attention to him inevitably, the rosy color of the back of his neck is only visible to her. She’s not used to seeing him shy around anyone else. For some reason, it feels normal for him to be nervous around Wells, even if she can’t figure out why.

She scoots to the other side of the bed, one leg hanging off of it and toes balancing on the floor, as Wells moves closer to check Bellamy out.

“Who checked it last?” Wells asks him casually, ignoring the way Bellamy stiffens when he rolls his shirt up and exposes the crescent on his abdomen.

Clarke rolls on to her side and leans her head on the palm of her hand, watching flippantly, because she wants to wait for Bellamy to go up to the mess hall. Wells said he’ll be alright to go today; she’s going to make him keep his word to that.

“I never caught his name,” Bellamy shrugs, eyes stuck to whatever Wells is doing.

“Wasn’t Abby just down here?”

“Uh yeah,”

Clarke snorts before she can stop herself, the idea of her mother even approaching Bellamy’s bedside an eyesore. She busies herself with getting on top of the covers, with stretching out and reaching down to get her shoes from the floor, so as to avoid Wells’ disapproving glare.

“Listen, Raven’s been seething about your mom for days,” he says tiredly, leaning over to get a better look at Bellamy’s abdomen. “I’m Switzerland.”

“You’re always Switzerland,”

“Does this hurt?”

He must be prodding somewhere vulnerable, but Bellamy doesn’t really have a reaction to it. He just holds on to the edge of his shirt, stays watching Wells’ movements curiously.

“No,”

“You sure about that?” Clarke smirks, rolling back on to her side with a hand under her face to watch the two of them again. She takes in the white around his knuckles, the only tell he’ll give away.

“You like seeing me in pain?” he asks, not looking at her, his lips leaning too far to one side.

“So you admit you’re in pain?”

“Remind me why you’re here again?” Wells sighs, masking his amusement, and partial awkwardness, with grabbing Bellamy’s wrist and taking his pulse.

“To help you do your job,” she rolls her eyes, as though it’s a given, so that she doesn’t have to admit that she’s here because there is absolutely nothing keeping her away.

“Real helpful,” he says under his breath, letting the smile creep out faintly.

“You know you’d be nothing without me, Jiminy,”

“Jiminy?” Bellamy asks, eyebrow raised as he turns his face to look at her. His eyes haven’t quite gotten the memo, still half asleep. It is crazy sexy.

“The cricket apparently,” Wells offers, still pattering around.

“Oh the conscience thing,”

Clarke is surprised he can remember something like that, given she mentioned it when he’d only just woken up, and when they had a lot more important things to talk about. He seems to think for a moment, and she gets distracted by the animated expression, how it is so easy to know that he’s trying to work something out.

He looks to Clarke from the corner of his eye.

“Going by that analogy, surely you’d be nowhere without- uh, Wells?” he hesitates to say his name, as though he’s contemplating calling him something else, as though Mr. Jaha might be more fitting. Clarke chokes down the laugh.

She ignores answering the question while Wells busies himself with his actual job. He can’t see the way she narrows her eyes at Bellamy, bites the inside of her lip to keep from smiling too much. She shakes her head as she mumbles, “Kiss ass,” so quietly that only Bellamy will hear it.

He throws her off by winking back, never having been one to play by the rules. Bellamy winks in the way that she knew he would, without the rest of his face giving it away, so quick that if she were to blink, she’d miss it. He winks in that smooth, admirable way. The way that makes the hair at the back of her neck rise.

He doesn’t need a comeback when he can wink at her like that, and her fingers curl around her scalp a little tighter just to remind Clarke of where she is. His gaze stays, stuck to catching her reaction, like he knows just the effect doing something like that will have on her, and like he knows nothing of it whatsoever.

“You’re looking good Blake,” Wells says, oblivious. “You ready to get out of here?”

Bellamy just nods until Wells turns away, then he sneaks a smug glance to Clarke.

“See?” he hums, so low. “It pays to be a kiss ass.”

“Can he go now?” Clarke asks instead of responding, hungry and eager to spend time with Bellamy in any place. Eager to spend time with Bellamy in every place.

“Sure,”

“I’ll come back for my shit in a couple of hours,” Bellamy nods, already reaching to get out of the bed, not even bothering to change before he too is grabbing the shoes Octavia brought down for him. He’s like someone getting up on Christmas day, and Clarke wants to run her fingers through his hair.

Wells nods, radiating self-assurance in a way that lets her know he thinks he knows something that they don’t, that he thinks he sees something that they can’t.

“Roan will put you on the rotation again, but you’ll be with someone,” he tells him as she reaches for her sweater. She can feel Bellamy’s eyes on her as she shoves it over her head, flicks her hair out of the collar hurriedly, then swings her quiver over one shoulder. “No heavy duty shit-”

“Language,” she mouths, just for the sake of it.

“For the next couple of weeks, you lay low. Be _part_ of the team, not the… team,”

Bellamy does at least change his shirt, stretching over his head in a way that would have been painful a couple of days ago. Clarke has her bowstring hanging at her knee by the time they’re ready to get lost, the thrill of going somewhere together stupidly endearing.

“Thank you,” she says quietly to Wells when Bellamy’s back is turned. They don’t bother making the bed; they can do it later. Instead, Clarke walks around to the foot of the bed, meets Bellamy there, and nods her head to the doors that weigh so much.

“It was a good thing you did,” Wells calls when they’re just starting to walk away, clearing his throat as though debating with himself about whether or not to even say it. They both turn on their heels; Clarke can’t figure out which of them is more surprised. Bellamy’s face is blank. “It might have been completely moronic, but you did good Bellamy.”

He makes momentary eye contact with Clarke, nods his head shortly at her but she can’t quite read what it means. Bellamy is speechless; Wells isn’t acting as though he should say anything in return.

“Clarke, I’m going to the gym tonight. I could use a sparring buddy,”

“You want to fight?”

He shrugs his shoulders.

She drops her head, hiding the smile.

“You being a badass will never not be weird to me,”

“Yeah, well get used to it,”

She looks between the two of them, how Bellamy’s fingers are tapping against each other. She really could get used to it.

 

…

 

Clarke doesn’t expect him to be able to walk perfectly on his own just yet. It’s still a little fresh, there’s still going to be some tension throughout his body since the bullet hit him straight through the middle of it. So when Bellamy tries to be the one to open the door for the two of them, she has to bite her tongue to keep from reacting too much.

His gait reminds her of someone who has just hit water from twenty feet high, the sound just weaker than a sonic boom. His shoulders are set back widely, his feet don’t take the long strides that are usually double hers.

She watches him from the corner of her eye and tries to quench the urge to reach out. She knows he’ll have to be able to hold himself on his own eventually, but she’s not Raven. She’s not one of those people who can pretend they’re alright with watching someone bear their own pain.

There isn’t any rush. Clarke has watch in a few hours, but they’ve got time to eat, to move him back up to Ark, to just let seconds melt into more seconds.

“Look at you,” she hums, just a corridor down from the infirmary, her willpower dwindling already. “Carrying yourself and everything.”

Bellamy just quirks an eyebrow, concentration streaming mostly into the cracks of his armor. She knocks her shoulder into his, her bow slung so that it won’t invade the space between them.

“Don’t hold strong simply for appearances, Bell. If you need someone to lean on then-”

“You really don’t ever stop,” he sighs, as though he’d expect any less.

“No, not really,”

Clarke doesn’t quite know how to stress that she’s being serious. The joke is only skintight. While it is easy to tease him about his stubbornness, he should understand that she can take his weight. That she can hold him up too.

It’s probably a good thing that he’s focused on his feet, since she knows she’s not exactly smiling, and he’d worry if he saw. Any distance just feels like too much distance, and the irrelevant gap between their shoulders is hurting him.

It’s not awkward. It would be peaceful if Clarke weren’t thinking too much.

She makes it to the staircase before she tries again, before she throws caution to the wind and decides her pride is nothing in comparison to Bellamy having to move up these stairs. He doesn’t seem sad to have to do it; he’s so used to pain now, perhaps he considers it a normalcy. He is wading through a tower, because he has never known air to be thinner.

“Awful lot of stairs, huh?” Clarke looks over the bannister that bends both above and below them. “You’re sounding a little out of breath.”

She knows he wouldn’t be leaving the med ward if he didn’t feel ready. No. No she doesn’t know that.

Bellamy only shakes his head.

“Not because of this,” he says with a wry smile, his finger pointing to the path ahead.

It’s enough to make Clarke scoff.

“Don’t try and tell me you’re out of shape because of a week spent in a hospital bed,”

“I didn’t say that either,”

She looks to him, her hand empty. His hair is falling over his forehead.

“Miller said we all talk in riddles,” she lets him know, starting to understand what he meant by that.

“Miller’s an idiot,”

“What are you talking about Bellamy?”

The way Clarke throws her hands up, exhausted with the exhaustion in his voice, it must make him give in. He lifts his head for the first time, watches her for barely a moment with an expression so simple that her tunneled mind can’t comprehend it. They don’t stop moving, because there are a lot of stairs to climb and they are the only ones who can get them up them.

His fingers linking themselves around hers are so smooth that Clarke almost forgets to register it. Her hand in his is a compromise. It is her saying ‘you don’t have to do this alone,’ and it is him saying ‘I don’t want to do this alone,’ and the blush rising through her cheeks is so hot that it is almost numbing.

She wonders when she retreated into this elementary school mindset, of obsessing over a hand around her own, but the touch feels overwhelming enough to be the only thing necessary. When a kid holds the hand of the boy she likes, she’s not expecting anything other than his hand.

“Everything Clarke,” he sighs, squeezing her fingers between his as though to remind her that he could crush them, as though to remind her that he won’t. His shoulders don’t radiate nearly as much tension, but she can’t be smug right now. “I’m talking about everything.”

If this were a different ripple in the ocean of time, she would crack a joke about how that is the epitome of what Miller is complaining about. Bellamy doesn’t react when she pulls her arm away from him, or when she skips the next couple of stairs in order to overtake him, to get around to his other side. He doesn’t say anything when she takes her bow from her shoulder and leans it on to the other, to keep it out of the way, and when she takes the hand on the opposite side of his body in the one on the opposite side of hers.

There is no scar on this hand. There’s no weakness in this hand. Sometimes, he needs to see strength in her, and it doesn’t lie in a jagged edge of warning, eternal irregularity.

“Everything,” Clarke echoes, the air thinning out the higher they get, so thin that she can actually see through it. He squeezes her fingers again, perhaps this time to remind himself that he has someone to lean on. “I like it when you talk about everything.”

Bellamy breathes a laugh, like she’s missed his point completely. It doesn’t matter. He is holding her hand.

 

…

 

It is a little late for breakfast, a little early for lunch. That means there are only a dozen people in the mess hall, and that Monroe is in between taking trays away from the food counter and bringing them towards it. Clarke’s hoping she’ll be lenient with the two of them, thinks for a moment that he should have kept some of the bandaging to pull the sympathy card.

She’d tell him to put the limp on some more if they were different people. Bellamy is still holding her hand when she opens the door for them both, his arm crossed over hers, his shoulder behind hers, his hair an absolute mess.

The first thing Clarke notices, when they walk inside, is that he’s smiling a lot less than he’d been a few minutes ago. His expression has faded back and he is keeping his head down, not shyly, just without ease.

They grab some food when Monroe is moving back into the kitchens, rushed so as not to get caught, and Bellamy whips his tray into his hand before Clarke can try to take it. She rolls her eyes behind his back as he leads the way to their empty table, avoiding looking at the crawling algae in the corner.

Bellamy sits down opposite her, further down from the end than they usually sit; there’s no need to make room right now. Clarke puts her bow next to her on the bench.

She misses his hand. They are not going to be the people who insist on holding hands while they eat. The harsh lights seem strange to him, his eyes squinted faintly to adjust to all of the enhanced input. She tosses her hair over one shoulder before she starts eating to stop it getting caught between her back and her quiver.

“Nope,” she snaps, ten minutes later. The fragile quiet was never going to last long, not with the sparse eavesdroppers, not with the need of a distraction from the congealed food. “There’s no way. I’m calling bullshit.”

Bellamy has his fist pressed to his mouth as he chews, fork pointed towards her.

“For real,” he shakes his head, fingers tapping absently. His lips are twisted, edging him towards debate. “I got suspended for it.”

“Broad daylight? In an enclosed space?”

“He thought it’d start a chain reaction,”

“How?” she laughs, half jealous, half convinced that he’s just taken this from a kids’ comic book.

“I don’t know,” Bellamy gives, shrugging one shoulder. “Gas taps?”

“How did you even get them?” Clarke asks, decidedly just jealous. She was definitely the type of kid who wanted to be the one setting fireworks off in a science lab as part of an end of year prank, but she was also the kid who had enough practicality to talk herself out of it.

He can see that she is asking with wonder, with admiration, and he is lapping it up, as though he didn’t get the shitty end of the deal.

“I was an early bloomer,” he grins, that crescent smirk hidden behind his hand.

Clarke rolls her eyes again. “Of course you were.”

He is looking at her like he wants to do something unfathomable, like pat her head or tweak her nose. She remembers having braces when she was fourteen, can picture him not even looking twice at her when they were that age.

“I always liked fireworks,” she hums, when she has gathered the courage to look up at him again.

“Everyone likes fireworks,”

“Though fourth of July kind of ruined them,”

“How so?” Bellamy asks, narrowing his eyes, like he’s getting ready to fight her on this.

“I don’t know,” she admits, buying time to figure out how to put it into words. “They shouldn’t have been commercialized. You want to feel like you’re getting away with something when you set them off.”

Clarke watches as he looks to the corner of the ceiling, wide enough to roof a ballroom, watches as he chews on the side of his mouth in thought.

“Like how people stopped wanting to smoke weed when it became legal?”

She forgets that they came from different places, that they haven’t lived their lives following abandoned cars along a highway. That Bellamy could smoke weed without the threat of trouble.

“Lucky shit,” she mumbles into her barely boiled rice. His grin is way too smug for someone who doesn’t get to have that over her anymore.

“Like that stopped you,” he shakes his head, pearly whites flashing so bright that she is worried the guy a few tables down might get caught in the glare.

Clarke ducks her head. She doesn’t want to be the girl laughing in the faces of the people who don’t have that luxury anymore.

They’re quiet for a moment, caught up in the ideas and the pictures, and the gems they’re giving to one another.

“Remember the ones that stayed in the sky?” Bellamy asks, making her jump.

“Huh?”

“Fireworks,”

“Stayed?”

“I don’t know,” he grasps for thin air with the words. He is talking shyly, he is giving her another gem. Clarke holds her head in her hand, to put all of her effort into listening. “They were calmer. Octavia called them the weeping willows, said they reminded her of the trees,”

“Which ones were they again?”

“Weeping willows?”

She nods slowly. “I recognize the name.”

“The ones that had branches hanging down like vines, you could walk between them and they’d wrap around you, so thick you couldn’t see out of them. The branches move under like, a breeze, like bubbles that can drift but… stay,”

“As in ‘when the shadows fall, bend little willow and weep for me’?”

“No,” he simpers, shaking his head.

“Why not?”

Bellamy shrugs as though that’s an answer. As though the words to that song are enough of an explanation, as though whoever wrote those words is a fool. “She wanted to hide the stars.”

“Okay,” she narrows her eyes, accepting the challenge. “‘I miss the rolling hills and willow trees?’”

“‘Please don’t stay?’”

“You’re an idiot,” Bellamy smiles in response. “Maybe that’s just their thing. Maybe they’re meant to be depressing.”

“No,”

“No?”

“You just haven’t listened to enough songs,”

“Why the weeping willows?”

“What?”

“Why those fireworks?”

He shrugs. Clarke starts playing with the toggles of her hoodie once she has shoved her empty plate away, too entertained to bother moving just yet. When Bellamy talks, he hides his chin in the collar of his shirt.

“The others all kind of hid their embers the second they were out. These were the only ones that didn’t…” he catches her watching him. “Do that- stop laughing at me.”

“Sorry,” Clarke grins, her heart on fire or close enough to the flames to be in trouble. “Go on. Tell me more,”

“Don’t you remember?” he raises an eyebrow.

“I liked the colors. They were fun to mix paint for,”

“They were gold,”

“Hm?” she chews on the toggle to keep from saying how much that means _something_.

Bellamy clears his throat before he carries on and scratches the shadowed part of his jaw. Seeing him nervous for no reason at all will never not be amusing.

“I don’t know. They lingered in the sky. They were dainty, you know, it felt like whoever made them knew exactly where each one would land.”

And, God, she knows him so well, she doesn’t need to guess at why he liked them so much. She can see it in his eyes, that admiration. She’s seen it in darkness, and she’s seen it in light.

“They were constellations,” she says with a toggle between her teeth.

He looks up, his lips twisted into something special. Clarke doesn’t understand how she could ever learn someone like this. It feels too valuable, too rare to be here where they are.

“Exactly,” he answers her, quieter still. There’s something bashful in his cheeks. There’s something almost perfect in the space between them.

She’d like to see a willow tree bend under the faintest wind. She’d like to see a golden firework collapse into predetermined patterns.

“You’re a dork,” Clarke tells him. Just so that she doesn’t tell him anything else.

 

…

 

She asks him if he’s sick of her yet, or if he’d like some help moving his stuff back into his room. Bellamy doesn’t even bother answering, but he doesn’t send her away either, doesn’t even seem like that’s what he is trying to do.

He just hands her the dusted duffel bag that Octavia brought his clothes down in, and she holds the zip open as he shoves things flippantly into it. Clarke tries to tell him to sit down, to just let her to it, but he ignores her each time. She insists on carrying the bag upstairs at least, and he compromises by reaching over her shoulder and shedding the bow from it.

Bellamy wearing her bow doesn’t look strange exactly, it is just new. He wears it like he is wearing diamonds. The etched stars sit pointedly on his shoulder, and he radiates smugness at the thought of helping her out with something, like he is getting away with something for carrying it.

She’s not about to argue, not when he’s simultaneously admitting defeat, and the sight of him holding her weapon is too distracting to put up much of a front. Then she swings his bag over her shoulder like she would a bindle and turns on her heels to walk in step with him, and the sight of her mother in the crystal clear artificial lights, shoulders back, step light as she ascends towards the two of them, stops Clarke in her tracks.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she growls, when Abby makes it clear which bed she is going to, and Bellamy’s arm tenses next to hers. She can feel the inches between them freeze in place.

“Clarke,” she doesn’t even look at him.

“Go,”

“Clarke,”

It doesn’t matter where, whether it is to her station or to her position at what she thinks is the top of this building, she just needs to leave.

“We don’t need you here,” she snaps, voice as level as she can make it, listening to the way Bellamy breathes and marveling at the way he’s able to make himself look so strong even after the few days that he’s had of recovery. No. They don’t need her here at all. “You’ve saved his life. You’ve done your part. You can go now.”

“Bellamy, the other medics tell me you’re healing well. I came by to do some final check-ups, then you can go back to Ark,” Abby tightens her speech, her words clipped as she turns to him. Clarke feels the instinct rise up through her lungs, the one that tells her she needs to jump in front of him to stop him from getting hurt. She senses him nod awkwardly at her side, eyes so subtly on her that she wouldn’t notice normally.

She wants to say something, to get in the way of them both, but he moves to sit at the edge of his bed so quickly that Clarke feels cold wash over her side, her bow still on his back as he almost falls off of the mattress thanks to the tension riddled through him.

Abby hesitates to move closer, like she is looking for the latch to a fence between them, and Clarke rushes to stand next to him before she can. Bellamy looks up at her, his hand so empty at his side, his expression too calm for the way his body has become armor. She can’t bring herself to relax, not right now.

“Be sure to come back every day, at least for the next couple of weeks, just so that we can make sure everything is okay,”

“You hear that Bell?” Clarke asks him over her mother’s shoulder, cheeks unwilling to rise with her smile. “Mom’s gonna make sure everything is okay.”

He doesn’t make direct eye contact because she knows he’ll start smiling if he does.

Abby is already prepared to snap. She turns around sharply, leaving Bellamy behind her back, and steps toward Clarke with her face blank, bitten.

“Clarke, can we step outside for a moment?”

“No,”

Not even her eyes are saying please.

“I have nothing to say to you,”

She walks closer so that she can lower her voice, it is done with difficulty, considering her cold anger.

“I am only trying to look after you. I’m your mother, it’s what I’m supposed to do,”

“You’re right,” she nods, nose high. “You’re _supposed_ to do that. And sure, Mom, you treated me and brought me back from the dead twice over, but that doesn’t take back how disappointing you’ve been,”

“I have tried as best I could,”

Bellamy clears his throat awkwardly, as an offer to remove himself from the situation, but there’s nothing Clarke has to say that wouldn’t be said in front of him. She meets Abby, so close that her heavy eyes are wounding.

“You went out of your way to break apart my family for the sake of your own. You have hidden so much from me. You have gone above my head to stop me from leaving this place. A place, by the way, where only your name gives you power. Your name which isn’t even yours. It is mine, and my father’s. Not yours.”

And it is true. She is an excellent doctor, but she would not have the control over the safehouse if she were not the widow of a military official.

Bellamy stands up and Clarke shoves against her mother’s shoulder to get past her, to get to him. She just wants to hold his hand while he talks about willow trees.

“You are _my_ family,” Abby bites, snatching Clarke’s wrist to stop her midway. At least Clarke is between the two of them now, at least she can be a shield. She gets strength from that. “ _My_ child.”

“I am not a child. I am an adult who has proven she can pull her weight on her own,”

“You showed up on my doorstep with half of your life,” she spits.

She says it as though it’s an insult, as though Clarke should be apologizing for making Abby treat her.

“And I fought! I have not stopped fighting. I have been hurt and broken, and I am still standing-”

“Because of me!”

“No. Because of _me_.” She wrenches her arm away, and Bellamy doesn’t try to take it. Now isn’t the time for it after all. Instead, his gaze hovers low on her shoulder, and she feels his steel surround her body too. “You might have stitched me up, but I would rather die as a warrior than live as a coward. I am _strong_. _I_ was the one to pull myself out of the ashes when I woke up. You drove away the people who make me happy. You are the reason I feel trapped in this nuthouse, and you belittled someone who needed _hope_. You got to see walkers for a day Mom; it’s all well and good claiming strength when you’re all wrapped up in bubbles and en suite fucking bathrooms, but _we_ are on the front line. You might think you have authority over me, but you have _nothing_ over me. And you have nothing over him. Bellamy has earned integrity and conviction that shames you. You want to talk to me? I have nothing left for you. You don’t get to choose when I fight, because I am needed. With me, they have a stronger shot at making it and you pinning me down is selfish. You are not going to turn me into Cage Wallace. You do not get to choose who will stay in my life, who I get to call my family, who gets to love me, or who I get to love.”

“You think you’re in love with him?” Abby asks, unshaken. “Love blinds you Clarke.”

“No Mom. Love blinds you.”

And she is so tired of arguing with a brick wall, of talking to someone who she will never get through to.

Clarke can feel Bellamy still watching her cautiously, so she doesn’t wait around in pushing his bag back up on to her shoulder, or in shoving past her mother to get closer to the door.

“Come on Bell,” she says, her voice quiet from finality. “I’m on watch in an hour.”

He looks briefly to Abby, the cogs in his mind working overtime. He takes his time, hovering on his tiptoes awkwardly, and then he glances again, so briefly to Abby that Clarke almost misses it. He doesn’t look angry or hurt after everything that has happened. He doesn’t look like he is holding anything against her, Bellamy just looks… calm. He’s calm.

He nods once, as though to convince himself of something, eyes trained on the floor. He straightens the corner of Clarke’s bow against his hip, thumb brushing along it to remind himself that he’s got it, and then he is walking towards her, feet solid and chest gleaming with the armor around it.

She expected him to smile at her, or to wink, or to do something that might ease the tension in the room, but his face stays blank when he knocks against her side, when they move off together and towards the heavy doors that seem miles away.

And then she is leaning all of her weight on to one of them, and she doesn’t bother to check that he’s behind her, because she knows that he is.

Clarke is too busy storming forward, she’s got that familiar delay in her perception, to notice much else but the corridor ahead. And then Bellamy is wrapping his fingers around her arm, pulling himself towards Clarke as opposed to pulling her to him, and she collides into his chest with so much force that it is obvious this is still new.

She damns her stupid bow when she tries to wrap her arms over his shoulders, settles for curling them around his neck because she’s just that short and it’s the easiest way to be close to him. Bellamy’s hands begin at her sides, thumbs and fingers folding all the way around her body that way, and he uses that grip to pull her into his chest, to take some of her weight off of her feet some more.

Clarke wants to tell him that she doesn’t need this, that she’s stronger than needing this, but it doesn’t matter. She wants this. She wants only this.

He smells unbelievably good, and his skin is warmth that reminds her of branches intertwined into shelter, and everything about him is addictive in a way that shouldn’t be fair. Clarke settles into the edge of his collar, leaning more towards his exposed skin, and feels as he leans his head against hers.

His arms take their time in reaching around her, so different from when he practically caught her outside of that hotel, but so similar at the same time. When his hands reach one another at the center of her back, just a tiny bit away from her spine, she can hear his heartbeat in her lungs.

“I’m fine,” Clarke tells him, whispered underneath her breath which is struggling to be here right now. Her hold around his neck gets tighter, and his arm feels about ready to scoop her up by the waist.

Bellamy slowly moves one hand up her back, and its path is clumsy and stilted, but he reaches the base of her neck, pinches the skin so lightly between his fingers in a way that makes her tingle all over.

“You’re more than fine,” he hums, the tip of his fingers just scraping the nape of her neck, the edge of her hairline beneath dreads and curls that have a mind of their own. “God, Clarke, you’re so much more than fine.”

She wonders why they ever have to do anything but this. Why the world can’t just be Bellamy’s arms around her and his shirt against her nose.

It wasn’t calm that he was wearing like it would never fit to anyone else better, it was pride. He was proud of her. He looked her mother in the eye with pride about the fact that she could recognize her own value, and Clarke can’t stomach the pressure behind her eyes at the thought of that.

“I said that I’m strong,” she says, to make sure she’ll remember saying it out loud. “I meant it.”

“Mean it forever,” he asks of her, something that doesn’t feel impossible. “You are so strong, so strong and I-”

“And what?”

Is she stars right now? Is she stars to him?

Bellamy doesn’t finish his thought. It’s okay. She is cut from her strings, and he’s supporting her to make sure she doesn’t fall, his hand bracing her neck and her weapon over his shoulder, tucking himself into her in so many ways.

 

…

 

Bellamy’s room is something completely new. The most she’s seen of it is the inside of his door, when his fleeting back has moved through the doorway like he was trying to get to some other realm. He doesn’t share. He could share, because his bed is double bunked just like hers is, but he doesn’t. The top one isn’t dressed, just the bottom one, and for some reason she knew he’d take the one closest to the ground.

Apart from the lonely mattress almost scraping the ceiling, nothing about this room is different to hers. Apart from the things that not a lot of people would notice, like how closing the door to it behind her back feels an awful lot like stepping inside, through the walls of, a cloud. That feeling of being at the heart of a furnace, that realization of ‘oh, this is what keeps this whole building warm’.

The drawers to his dresser have been left wide open, sleeves and pant legs hanging out, but there are no clothes littering the floor like she and Raven allow. This must have been the wake of Octavia, who Clarke supposes doesn’t think twice about leaving mess.

When Bellamy leads the way into his room, he doesn’t wait around before he’s already panicking, striding towards the unfolded pile and shoving them back into the drawers with verging on unproductive haste. Clarke fights down reminding him that she knows he’ll just go back to folding it neatly the second he’s alone, but the embarrassment of being caught with an untidy room is too amusing. He reaches for the corner of his blanket, tugs it so that it sits flat on the bed instead, and then looks to the door with a red face as though he might have been able to clean the room before Clarke could come in.

She says nothing at all, just leaves the bag to rest on the top bunk, still looking around the room with interest. For some reason, she expected him to have a window. For some reason, she’s disappointed that he doesn’t. The unshaded bulb, off center of the ceiling, is flickering just to the point of being noticeable. She points to it.

“It’s not the bulb,” he says, scratching the back of his neck, giving her his tell. “I’ve already tried to replace it.”

“That must get annoying,”

“Only when I need a nightlight,”

“I thought you’d be rooming with Miller,” she muses, corner of her mouth lifting at his fluid sarcasm.

“I offered,” Bellamy shrugs, leaning against the ladder.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t know about him and Monty?”

“Monty?”

“They were living together when we got our room assignments,” he says like it is common knowledge. Clarke had no idea. Well, she had some idea that there was _something_ , but nothing on that scale.

“Together together?”

Bellamy squints his eyes, wincing.

“They started off casual,” he raises an eyebrow, sitting down on to his bunk and patting the space next to it for Clarke to take a seat too. She watches as he bends to reach for something under it, as he comes up with the boots he wears on watch, on mission, and hesitates to join him. This bed sure is smaller than the hospital one, and it’s different. It is _his_. Sitting on top of it isn’t the tiny deal that he seems to think of it as. She decides to stop being such a priss about it, hovers down against the blanket and ignores the brush of his arm against hers as he reaches to undo his laces. “Never put an actual label on anything.”

“But they were living together?”

“Yeah. Then Jasper started getting bad and Monty told Miller that he couldn’t put a fuck buddy before his best friend. I think it was when you- well, after the second time that they said you were-”

She doesn’t blame him for not being quite able to say it. She doesn’t want to say it either.

“And Miller just left?”

“He should have been living up here anyway,” he shrugs, leaving something unspoken. “It worked out.”

“You think it was more,” she doesn’t ask him, she can read it already.

“He doesn’t like to talk about it. It’s not like I would have been any good at advice then anyway- I could barely stand myself up that week. But yeah, I think it was more.”

“Have they spoken since? I can’t imagine Monty would want to end things on bad terms,”

“They’ve spoken. It was like watching kids in a schoolyard. Miller doesn’t blame him for what happened, if they’d been a little more honest with each other I think they’d still be together,”

“Why weren’t they?”

Bellamy shakes his head, but he looks like he understands. Why would they be? Is it not so much easier to ignore feelings like that, Clarke supposes. To say it isn’t would be drastically hypocritical.

“Miller tried to have an actual relationship after, thought that was his problem since he couldn’t get over it. Him and Jackson barely lasted a month. I think he just wants space now,”

Clarke nods. It makes sense. It really is sad though, to think that all of that was because of miscommunication. She’s quiet, unsure what else to say until he’s finished tying the laces to his boots.

“So yeah, I’m in here alone,”

“How do you sleep?” she asks him, knowing how hard it is for her when Raven isn’t up there.

“I… well, I don’t,” he gestures to the bed, as though it’s carrying some sort of sign to tell her that.

“You were on the roof that night,”

“Yeah, most nights,”

She nods again. There’s no need to ask a question that she doesn’t want the answer to.

 

…

 

And of course, things, as things tend to do, go to shit again over the next couple of hours.

Bellamy asks her if she is sick of him yet, if she wants him to find something to do elsewhere, and Clarke contemplates answering with a joke until she sees how serious he’s being, how much he genuinely feels like she’d be irritated by his presence for any long period of time, as though they didn’t spend a solid four months together without pause. So instead, she tells him that she is not sick of him, and he responds by telling her that he’d like to get outside for a while.

She knows he prefers the roof, and yet he doesn’t leave her side when she starts heading down for her watch shift. The compromise made, the literal drop in available arenas, doesn’t go unnoticed, and she listens to his fervent retelling of the blurb of a book he’d been wanting to read before the world went dark.

He at least sits down with his back against the wall when she gets into watch position, the strain of carrying himself for so long finally catching up, but the conversation makes time pass in that frightening way. In the way that convinces Clarke that life is an awful lot like the plot of Mary Poppins, how it only sticks around, makes itself known, when it is not wanted. How it reminds its companions that it’ll be leaving soon when it is wanted.

And Niylah is already there when they get there, and the awkwardness of her realizing that Clarke and Bellamy aren’t at odds anymore is bad, but it is something that they were going to have to deal with soon enough. Quite frankly, it isn’t any of her business. And quite frankly, her partiality is welcome.

They are similar sorts of people, after all, her and Bellamy. They share a simplicity, a caustic, somewhat sad outlook on the occasional subject. But hours later, the sun sets, and when the sun leaves, so does Niylah. And that is when things start going wrong.

Echo shows up. Enough time passes where it’s just the two of them, and for a lucky minute, Clarke expects to have this to themselves for the rest of the watch, but no. Since she’s facing the wall, she doesn’t see anyone walking towards them, and Bellamy is looking up at her as he talks, so he doesn’t notice Echo either.

But her clicking gets closer and closer, until it is here, on the other side of the gates from them, and if Echo was cold before then she is ice now. Clarke doesn’t have to look at her to feel the hostility, and she’s too scared to look at Bellamy. So instead, she aims, keeps her gaze focused on the outskirts, and ignores the way her skin starts to crawl.

She responds to everything he says, but he doesn’t say much either. Clarke spirals for a moment about how, if this is how uncomfortable things can be in open space, spending days in a rover is going to be a whole other hurdle. She’s glad that he’s not acting shifty, not making things weird, but Bellamy wouldn’t be Bellamy if he went out of his way to make people feel uncomfortable.

And there’s an hour left of her watch shift, the night so muggy that a shower is all she can really think about at this point, and Bellamy is almost falling asleep against the wall, refusing to go upstairs no matter how many times Clarke tells him to go. He brushes her off quietly, spends his time untying and retying her laces for entertainment, tying the boots together at one point as though she won’t notice, his boyish grin too adorable even under shadows.

She’s laughing when she sees it. The rounded beacon of something coming closer, then the other as it rounds a corner, light reaching the base before a familiar rumbling sound can catch up with it.

“Bell,” she snaps, flicking her head towards the rover, because his sister is back.

He gets up to his feet and Clarke moves toward the gate, hand out to get to the lever but Echo is already there, fingers wrapped around it as she watches through the eyesight for the signal of when to pull it.

Clarke pours her focus into checking for signs that the rover is being followed. She hears the exhaust blow, or a noise very similar to that, and the vehicle starts swerving drastically from side to side, and she can see, even in the darkness, the back door swinging open behind it.

So the exhaust didn’t blow. They’re shooting. And that means she needs to be shooting too.

“Echo now!” Bellamy yells over, hand brushing against Clarke’s waist as he moves around her, as she reaches behind her back for an arrow and loads her bow to aim.

She catches sight of a silhouette trailing the dust picked up by the back wheels of the rover, shoots it without hesitating, because the drag of its front leg isn’t human. Another figure replaces it, so she shoots that one too.

“Echo!”

Bellamy cranks the lever and the rover comes tumbling through, his arm pulling it back up almost in the same second. Clarke can’t run over to it, she has a responsibility to stay and keep the walkers back, so she does. Ten go down, commotion is erupting behind her, another five go down.

The rover stopped barely feet away from the building; it was probably travelling faster than they’ve let it go before. Clarke waits for noise to be trapped behind the walls once more before she runs over, over to where people are already piling out of the vehicle and running inside frantically.

She grabs on to the edge of the door when she gets to it, to stop herself from sprinting, and Bellamy is there already. She’s about to smile when she catches sight of Octavia, sat on the floor of the cargo space, but then she sees what is in her hands.

She has blood in her hands. She has blood and a leg. A leg that leads its way up to Raven, whose form is limp and whose eyes are lidded heavily. Who does not have blood.

“No,” Clarke says, casting her bow down to the ground, behind the wheel, barreling forward. Her knees bruise when they hit against the elevated platform, as she crouches forward awkwardly. It’s so dark everywhere. “No, no, no. What happened?”

Octavia looks up, her nails painted pink and rosy and patchy. She looks terrified.

“It is not a big deal,” Raven mumbles, her lips lifting on her face, her top lip barely visible under the bottom one.

“Shut up Raven,” Octavia growls at her.

“Just get me the fuck out of here, quick,”

Hands land on to Clarke’s waist and pull her out of the entrance before she can hold on to anything. Her first instinct is to get out of that grip, so she kicks against it, hears a grunt behind her but the fingers don’t slip. She gets thrown down to the ground, feels the bare skin along her arm graze against loose gravel and knows the warm sting will draw blood.

There’s shouting. There seems to always be shouting, eventually. Her chin burns, she touches it to see red. There isn’t time to wait around, and someone else must know that, because she gets lifted to her feet by another set of hands, by bigger hands, ones that don’t throw her or shove her away.

Clarke falls heavily to Bellamy’s chest, his arms coming to wrap around her to keep her upright, palms cupped against her back. He’s shouting at someone, he sounds angry. Angry in ways that can be scary, scary like blaring red headlights and warning signs. Clarke sees blood.

“I need Wells,” she hears Raven say from inside. Someone stands on her bow as they walk.

“Echo go,” Roan isn’t wearing patience, he’s losing it for the first time. Clarke doesn’t blame him for shoving her away, shoving her at the ground, not if he is trying to help Raven. Bellamy cuts the menacing snarl of his lips, his attention dragged away from Roan.

“We need someone on-”

“Go!”

Clarke uses Bellamy’s shoulder to get back to where she was, hopes his and her strength combined will be enough to get past Roan.

“Clarke stay back,”

“She’s hurt,”

“I know,” he charges, spinning around to loom over her. “But I am breaking every bit of protocol right now, and I am not risking you too,”

What is that even supposed to mean?

“What happened?” she breathes. Nyko is carrying Raven out, Octavia taking her other side. They get her to the edge of the rover so that half of her body is spilling over it, the other half- the one carrying her punctured leg- still in Octavia’s hand. There is a knife on the floor behind them. Clarke feels Bellamy step up to her shoulder, reaching to give them a hand, his spare balancing on the base of her back to make sure she doesn’t fall over.

“No time,” Roan snaps, lifting Raven’s arm over his shoulder. “I’m taking her down to the med ward. Stay on watch.”

“Go,” Bellamy says in her ear, his voice set. “I can take care of watch.”

Roan takes the majority of Raven’s weight in his arms, her head lolling forward sleepily. Clarke moves to catch her. Raven beams when she sees her friend again, as though she’s not bleeding out.

“Angel, you’re staying here,” Roan growls before he puffs his chest out at Bellamy, really the only way to have physical authority. “Blake if you expect to have any sort of responsibility after the shit you pulled last week, you’ll make sure she stays.”

Bellamy glances carefully over to her, his eyes cautious and analyzing.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I follow Clarke. Not you,” he says, rushed, aware that there isn’t time for misplaced tension, but that he won’t be appeasing. And that this tension probably isn’t misplaced according to the two of them.

There is a puddle on the ground, crawling around Clarke’s feet. It reflects spotlights that are no use. It looks like a pond, or a really still lake. It isn’t red, but it is red.

“Octavia,” she gasps, because Octavia is the one who knows.

“Clarke, I’m sorry,” Raven whispers when her head rolls around to rest on her shoulder, with it, the rest of her slack.

“Raven, shut up,”

“No,” she tries to lift her head, but it isn’t much use. “You are my, you’re what I had when I had nothing else. Y’know I think I found you before I found myself,”

“Keep her talking,” Nyko calls, grabbing something from inside the rover. He sounds reassuring, like he is confident in whatever is happening.

“We were teenagers,” Clarke says, too soft for the color soaking through to her boots. “Of course you did.”

“No,” Raven smiles. She seems like she knows something. “When I _found_ you.”

“I don’t know what that-”

“Just love you,”

“Why are you talking like this?” she’s trying not to lose it, but there is something wrong here. Really wrong. “Why are you trying to say goodbye?”

“Damn walkers,” she grumbles, her smile fading. Clarke’s stomach drops and the puddle surrounding her ripples with the weight of it. “Got me last second. Fucking laughed like it knew.”

“Raven,”

“Didn’t bite,” she hums, like that clears things up. It doesn’t clear anything up. Raven doesn’t seem to care.

“Why is there so much blood?”

“We decided to try something. Couldn’t do it here,”

Her head jerks on its pivot, back into the bay of the rover. The knife is gone. Clarke sees Octavia towing Wells towards them, his face losing all color to it, all expression.

“Fall in love again,” Raven whispers, tugging on Clarke’s neck to bring them on to the same level. She asks it as though they’re sharing secrets over a campfire. “You are so stupidly beautiful. You deserve someone like him, so let him love you.”

She can’t answer that. How can she even think about it when her best friend is wilting in her arms? Wells approaches the group, puts a heavy hand on to Clarke’s shoulder, telling her that she needs to move away. Her footsteps make squelching sounds when they fall out of this lock, as he slips under Raven’s arm in her place, and Clarke feels herself tumble into Bellamy’s chest to get out of the lake.

She watches as they carry Raven out of the night, her foot dragging behind the three of them like it’s been dislodged from its socket. The rover gets left barren, scraped for parts, doors flung open and the engine barely given a chance to turn off. Octavia glances back apologetically before she follows Roan, Wells, and Raven.

Bellamy’s arms work their way around her body, one hand against her head, fisting the hair to give her some feeling back, his other hand clutching to her side. If his nails weren’t blunt, he’d be cutting her from the force with which he is digging himself into her. Clarke holds on to his shirt as she breathes, as he breathes too, and her eyes are pressed to his shoulder hard enough to keep them from leaking out.

She screams into the fabric, no, it’s too guttural to be a scream. She roars into the fabric. Bellamy presses closer, as though they could actually get closer, but he presses closer. He moans when she does, he holds her as she shouts, as she muffles her shouts in the way that cotton muffles the cold from reaching a baby’s foot.

Bellamy holds Clarke’s head solidly in his hand as he presses his mouth hard and desperate to the side of it. She feels his lips against her temple, the soft cradling confession, a kiss that is a promise, and a sanctity, a lifeline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Run across the mustard dust sand, scream down the wind.'  
> \- Get Blown Away, Ocean Colour Scene  
> Next chapter is better, I promise. Okay, I'm going to just post this now and stop panicking, lol. Tell me something if you feel like it, I always love hearing, but no worries if you're reading silently. The fact that anyone at all is still reading this monstrosity is confusing beyond belief. SORRY again. Who knows what I'm apologising for at this point?


	42. Much as I love you, don't let me love you

As much as the warmth of Bellamy’s breath gives Clarke a cloud to rest upon, she needs to move. She needs to help. There isn’t time for leaning against her rock, and he knows that too. He untangles himself from around her but keeps his hands on her arms.

“Clarke,” he says, his voice rough around the edges.

“I can’t follow them,” she tells him, flipping her head around as though it might reveal a secret tunnel down to the med ward. “Roan will lose his shit.”

She knows there is something more, something they wouldn’t say. She can’t go charging down right now, not while Raven’s life could be hanging in the balance. Bellamy grimaces, his face still hard, and he slips an arm back around her when he moves the two of them forward.

Clarke gets into the passenger seat of the rover as he waves her into it, and he shuts the door softly. She doesn’t bother with the seatbelt.

Bellamy hauls himself into the driver’s seat in the next second, his faint, pained grunt a reminder that he shouldn’t have to deal with any of this tonight. There is a garage area around the back, small and just a roof for the rover, nothing more. He drives them around to it slowly, not saying anything. Raven’s blood is all over the floor of the cargo space; someone’s going to have to clean that up.

Clarke watches the wall from the window, how it looks the same all the way around. When Bellamy puts the rover in park, tucks it under its shelter, he sighs heavily, and she can feel him looking over.

His gaze is nervous; she wants to take his hand.

“Murphy needs to know,”

He sighs again.

“Clarke, you-” but it’s not like he can say anything to make this go away. Not really. Instead, she cuts him off and gracelessly climbs halfway over the gearshift to get to him.

Clarke hugs him to her, arms wrapped around his neck and the space of her heart lined up to his. He’ll stay down here. Someone has to.

“Take care of yourself,” she hums when her breath settles again.

Bellamy drops his face into her jaw, humming at the back of his throat absently.

“She’ll be fine,” he whispers into her skin. “You know she’ll be fine.”

She wants to admit that she is so tired. That she doesn’t know how much more of this she can take. But she can’t tonight, not when so many things are hanging in the air, not when Raven’s thread might be about to cut.

“Bellamy,” it’s not meant to be a moan, but that’s what it becomes. Because she can’t tell him she needs him like she needed fire when her infection spread, like she needed air when Cage tried to swallow her. She can’t tell him she needs him, so she says his name instead. Desperation is something pride can’t afford to exclude.

“Okay,” he shushes her, and she’s not sure which bit is okay, but he rocks Clarke gently, and she doesn’t have to figure him out right now. She turns her face into his, her nose running along his jawline.

She leaves him at the edge of the wall, holding the firearm that Echo left behind, his stance rigid and ready for an attack.

 

…

 

Murphy is alone in his room, obviously. When he swings the door open, hovers over the boundary to stop anyone from coming in, he is shirtless, and the hairs of his beard are sticking out ridiculously. He doesn’t react to seeing Clarke in his doorway, since she has knocked on his door so many times in the middle of the night, but he waits for her to say something.

So preoccupied with getting to him, she hasn’t had a chance to work out how to actually tell him that something is wrong. Her bones are so heavy, the strands of each hair on her head feeling like they’re being tied to a pile driver.

“Raven’s back,” she croaks out. It doesn’t take him long to get it.

“What happened?”

Murphy is already pushing back into his room, his face closing over in the way that it just does when he is preparing for something, and she follows him as he reaches around for some sort of shirt.

“I don’t know. Roan told me to stay back, she said it was a walker but that she didn’t get bitten and I- Murphy there was blood and she was trying to say goodbye, I-”

“Roan can go fuck himself,” he growls out, almost ripping the t-shirt in his hands in half as he tries to shove it over his head. When he reaches under his mattress for something, Clarke rushes to get there first.

“No guns,” she can’t believe she has to tell him.

Murphy rolls his eyes as though she is being unreasonable for suggesting it, as though he expects to have to shoot his way towards their friend. She forgets what happened when it wasn’t Raven in the hospital bed, how he was forced to wait behind a barred wall for weeks.

“No guns,” Clarke nods again, to make sure she doesn’t become tempted to follow through with his idea.

They run downstairs and he catches her arm when she trips over her own feet, but there is something cold settling in. His bedhead gets more rabid with the sprint; she is glad there are no kids still awake. He’s scary enough as he is, let alone when he’s afraid.

Octavia is outside the med ward when they get to it, Roan crouched opposite her, running his hands over his forehead.

“Clarke,” she sighs when she sees them, and rushes over just as quickly. Clarke lets her fall into her arms.

“It was a scratch,”

“What?”

“The walker,” Octavia breathes, her throat tight and her eyes exhausted. Murphy is radiating tension, radiating an impatience. “It grabbed her leg and it wouldn’t let her go. She got scratched but we didn’t know what that meant, whether she’d get-”

“Octavia,” he snaps when she starts losing her voice. Clarke winces. “Spit it out before I break that goddamn door down.”

Her worry turns into a snarl. “I’m going to let that one go,” she warns him in return, her head lifting even if her face is still weary. “She wasn’t bitten, she was scratched, but Roan has a policy with that sort of thing, first sign of infection and…”

“Bang,” Murphy nods, even though Roan is barely feet away. Clarke looks at him tentatively, but he hasn’t shown any surprise to her being here. He is too preoccupied.

They have never had to deal with something like that before. They know that a bite is fatal, and they know there are a multitude of ways to spread the infection. Raven could have easily gotten infected just from skin on skin, but-

“When?”

“Yesterday morning. We drove back as soon as it happened but he,”- she nods over to Roan- “decided to make things difficult.”

That’s not long enough. It could take days to set in.

“You don’t understand,” Roan stands to his full height, ascending on them. “Bringing her back here has put every single person in this building at risk,”

“Well then why did you?” Murphy bites.

“She had an idea,” Octavia clears her throat, looking behind her to the entrance of the infirmary. “Raven said she’d rather lose her leg than die and she thought if we just got rid of the flesh that got touched by the walker, she wouldn’t get infected.”

“All that blood…”

“So you decided to take a chunk out of her fucking body? You’ve seen yourself how easy it is for cuts to go nasty; we saw what that did to Clarke, how could you just-”

“I didn’t have a choice! What would _you_ have done Murphy?”

“ _I_ would have stopped her from getting hurt in the first place!”

“I tried,” Octavia growls between gritted teeth.

“Octavia,” Clarke says quietly, holding the back of her hand against Murphy’s chest to stop him from getting any closer. “This wasn’t your fault.”

This is new. This is so goddamn new, there’s no way to process it. Raven actually trying to hack out her own calf to stop the infection, it is nothing but a waiting game. Clarke can’t assume this is fatal, if she does then things will just sink. She doesn’t believe in fate, but she believes in her own productivity, and if she tells herself that Raven has no hope, she’ll cave inwards.

Especially now that she can physically feel Murphy deteriorating at her side.

“I need to go upstairs,” Roan clears his throat. “I need to clear this with the commanders before they hear it from someone else. No one mentions this to anyone, you got that? This will spread like wildfire and you’ll be seeing carnage within seconds.”

“Go,” Clarke waves, distracted by the drying blood all over Octavia’s hands. There is nothing they can do about that right now, not if they want to be the first ones to hear any news. Instead, she takes her hands and guides her to the wall opposite the doors, because she probably hasn’t actually sat down in hours.

Roan disappears, Octavia slouches against the wall and Clarke doesn’t know what to do with her own feet.

And then, like he can hear her calling out, Bellamy appears at the other end of the corridor, Clarke’s forgotten bow in his hand, walking as quickly as he can with his chest still internally weighted.

She reaches out for her bow, knowing she needs it at the back of her mind, but Bellamy reads her differently and takes it to be her asking for a hug. She’d laugh if this were any other day, if this were any other moment, but when Bellamy folds himself around her, engulfs her, it is quite possibly the only thing that could calm her down.

“Any news?” he asks, her bow against her back, his voice quiet so as not to startle her.

“Roan’s freaking out,” she whispers, scared to be indelicate around Murphy and Octavia. “She tried to cut out the part that got scratched.”

“What do you need?”

“We can’t do anything but wait,”

“Okay,” he breathes, stepping away. “Then we wait.”

“Like hell am I going to sit here and do nothing,” Murphy snaps, pacing between the width of the hallway.

“What else is there to do?” Clarke sighs, moving to sit next to Octavia.

“Lincoln is on watch- it was meant to be his shift now anyway,” Bellamy says, with none of his usual snark about the man that his sister has fallen for. “I came to see if you wanted him…” _instead of me._

His selfless words linger in the air. Clarke leans her head on to Octavia’s shoulder, exhausted, watching as he stands ahead of them.

The girl merely shrugs, not meeting her brother’s eye. He looks helplessly to Clarke as though to ask what he should do now, but he is where he should be. He needs to be here just as much as the rest of them do and considering Bellamy to be less important to this would be solidifying the fracture that they’ve started to heal. So she shakes her head slightly and waits as he dithers about some more before he relents and comes to sit on Clarke’s other side.

The pain the three of them must be having to swallow is unthinkable to her. When Bellamy sits down, his thigh brushes against hers and he crosses his legs awkwardly, and she can’t help but wonder if this was how he sat when he was waiting for news on her all of those months ago.

If Octavia was this quiet, if there was this much distance between Murphy and the world. They’re repeating a nightmare, they’re reliving a memory that acted as a catalyst for months’ worth of tension. And Clarke can barely handle this first sting; the image of Raven’s mouth foaming over, her eyes clouding into a soulless existence, haunting her from somewhere she had assumed would only live in her dreams.

Murphy is still pacing, head in his hand as though he is trying to come up with something. But what can he do? They are helpless until someone comes out and tells them what’s going on.

There is something crawling up Clarke’s throat: alive and threatening, and she waits for it to reach her tonsils before she grabs at Bellamy’s jittery hand. Her fingers are tiny compared to the size of his, and he responds instantly, the hairs at the back of his hand standing up with fear, and recurring trauma, and pain from holding himself strong for longer than he should have to.

And he is still doing it. He’s still pretending that he’s not in agony for the sake of loyalty. His palm faces the sky for hers.

Clarke watches as his fingers trail over hers, as he massages shaking bones with slow, languid motions. She folds them under his leg, so that he can keep holding on to her underneath shelter.

They are all quiet for a while and Octavia’s nails are still unspeakably brown.

Roan reappears, looking like he has aged a decade over the last couple of hours, and he takes a seat to the right of the doors, his knees brought up so that he can lean over them, opposite Clarke with hooded eyes. She respects him for coming back. He didn’t have to do that.

She doesn’t respect him for muttering grumbled complaints every ten minutes about the mistake he thinks he has made. Murphy is bubbling over and she knows she’s going to have to deal with the aftermath of his snap soon enough.

“Jesus, if people find out what we’ve done,” Roan sulks for the fifteenth time, picking absently at the dirty floor, and Clarke doesn’t look away from Bellamy’s knee pressed to hers when she responds, cold.

“Like that matters,”

“Of course it matters,”

“No,” Murphy scowls, speaking too loudly and too suddenly. “I’m not doing this again. I can’t.”

At first, Clarke assumes he is talking about this argument. It takes one look at him to realize it’s more than that. His feet won’t stay still and yet he is as slow as she’s ever seen him, like he’s wading through an ocean with each lap of the corridor. He is practically shaking, and yet he seems to be sweating. He is shutting down, just like Bellamy said he did before.

“Murphy,” she calls, wanting him to know that he has got people- that he may still have Raven.

He punches a wall.

“Shit,” he gasps, not without dignity, cradling his fist to his chest, if a little pathetically. He turns on Bellamy, marching forward and for a second, she worries he’s going to become his next punching bag. “Is this what it felt like? How did you fucking breathe man?”

She doesn’t know what he means until he nods straight to her, and until Clarke sees the shield in his almost-black eyes.

“Murphy this is not the time,” Octavia warns, her voice a whole octave lower than it usually is.

“Sit down,” Bellamy tries, sounding like he knows exactly what Murphy means, knows more than all of them combined, knows more of his words than what is fathomable. Clarke eyes him for a moment, takes in the hard set of his jaw and the large lump in his throat. She knows what his refusal to answer means; he couldn’t breathe.

“Don’t you tell me to do shit,”

“Murphy,”

“It’s okay, Clarke,”

“You went mad,” he points his finger. “You lost your fucking mind.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Bellamy says patiently, and Clarke feels him squeeze her hand tighter, like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.

“She was supposed to be safe. She was the only _fucking_ one who was safe,”

No one is safe, Clarke wants to say. No one.

“You broke your hand when it was Clarke. Don’t pretend you would ever handle something like this rationally,”

“And look at what happened because I didn’t,” he growls back, eyes aflame. “I’m trying to stop you from making the same mistake I did.”

“And you,” Murphy turns on Clarke and she bristles, ready to put her shield up. “ _You_ practically fought your way in there last week. You were getting ready to shoot him-” he gestures violently to Roan- “when he wouldn’t open the door.”

“Murphy give it a rest,” Octavia groans again, keeping Clarke from having to retaliate. She feels her face warm- Bellamy didn’t know how badly she panicked when he got hurt, and his focus is so strongly on her that she can’t even look in his direction. Those fiery eyes, beaconing straight toward her.

“Why am I the only one reacting to this like a normal fucking person?”

She’s had enough, and she is not going to sit here and watch him pick his friends off one by one as a coping method. Clarke still refuses to look at Bellamy, because she has a feeling he is a cross between dumbfounded and terrified, and she can only handle one thing at a time.

“Come with me,” she purses her lips, brushing off her trousers and breaking away from Bellamy’s hand only when she has stood up.

Murphy snorts, glares at her like she shouldn’t be so foolish as to believe he’d do as she says, but Clarke takes the back of his collar in her hand and shoves him along the corridor, not giving him a choice.

When they round the corner, she throws him against the opposite wall and pins him against it.

“Cut it out,” she tells him, quiet enough to not be overheard by any passers-by, if there were to be any passers-by.

“Get off me,” he growls, but she only leans her fists heavier into his chest- he could break free if he needed to. She is restraining him so that he’ll listen, so that he’ll give himself a chance to calm down.

“What are you trying to do? Other than piss everyone off? You think we need you shoving our weakest moments in our faces? Let me tell you, we don’t. Not right now. I am not going to let you shut down again,”

He doesn’t say anything, but he stops pretending to struggle underneath her clutches. He’s still seething.

“So everyone wants me to care until the second it gets real? Until it gets ugly? I don’t see anyone else caring, Clarke,”

“Are you kidding me? She’s my best friend,”

“And you’re fine with her turning into one of the things that we are literally trained to kill?”

“If you really think that of me then you are not the man I thought you were,”

“Maybe I’m not,” he smirks, and she pushes him into the wall again.

“Then get lost or grow the fuck up. You hated Bellamy for leaving, and you’re already pushing away all over again. When are you going to learn that you have people? That you have a responsibility to be there for those people?”

His eyes close for a second. And then the second stretches into a minute, and he doesn’t open them.

“It’s _Raven_ ,” he whispers, after enough time has passed for Clarke to assume he’s not going to answer her. “With you… it was…”

“Talk to me Murphy,” she prods, she pleads. He needs her just as she needed him through so many sleepless nights.

He’s silent again, until-

“It was like blood with you. Like I was already programmed to know what to do. And with her, it’s…”

“I know,” she tells him, meeting him on no man’s land, fingers loosening in his shirt. “I know.”

And that’s exactly what it is. Because Clarke is already programmed to know what to do with this, right here, like she was when Murphy fell in that river and rebroke his arm.

They can act like a group of friends all they want, they can pretend that the four of them are platonic for weeks if they have to, and yet there’s no erasing the feelings once they are there.

Clarke looks at him and sees a man who has had to do this before, and he didn’t get lucky like she did, or like Bellamy did. He already lost the love of his life, and it was definite.

“This isn’t Emori,” Clarke whispers, not letting go for a whole other reason. “Please don’t let yourself do that.”

“When it was him, you didn’t know what else to do,” Murphy says, calming still. “You didn’t eat Clarke, for days. You didn’t sleep until you passed out. You know what this feels like.”

“Exactly. And it hurts. It’s allowed to hurt. But you need to know what to do with that before it spreads, before it becomes a tumor.”

“So what do I do with it?”

He’s not going to cry. He’s not going to ask for comfort. She understands that.

“You wait. You stay and you wait for as long as it takes to get an answer. And when you have that answer, you be what she needs you to be.”

He won’t say love. He won’t explicitly admit that she is right. But Murphy nods his head, and Clarke takes her hands away so that he can stand up on his own.

She pushes him again when he refuses to meet her eye. He waits to speak until they are moving back towards the others, and when he does, it’s only to grumble about how they’re finding Monty and Jasper after this, and they’re robbing them of whatever moonshine they’ve got to hand.

Clarke doesn’t mind nodding along to that. It feels like months since she woke up wrapped around Bellamy in a hospital bed that she can’t get to anymore.

They turn the corner and Bellamy is the only one to look around, biting his lip in thought; anxious about something. He has shifted closer to his sister, taken up the space she left empty, and Octavia is almost asleep on his shoulder. Almost but not quite.

Still, Clarke crashes down on to his other side and pulls Murphy down with her this time. This floor probably hasn’t been cleaned since the outbreak; if she were to scrub at it, the color underneath all of the gathered dust and dirt would be lighter than the grey it has faded to.

Roan is falling asleep too, not having moved at all. Wells is in there with Raven, and he’s not going to let her go without putting up a fight.

She should snap at Bellamy to stop watching her, to stop looking for whatever it is he’s looking for, but she’s too tired and too on edge still. She is preoccupied with pressing her head against the wall to see if she can hear anything that’s going on inside the infirmary when he reaches out, so Clarke jumps. Bellamy pinches the very edge of her t-shirt and uses the grip to slide her along the grimy floor, closing the gap between them so that their hips bump into each other.

She falls against him, leans her shoulder on his too because she’s not going to pass up the invite once he has given it. Clarke wants his hand back, because the way he was rubbing her fingers between his made her whole body feel like it was in its ground state, but to give him her hand, from here, would be to give him her scar. And he shouldn’t have to have that now either.

There is a time and a place for ugliness, and it shouldn’t be here.

Instead, Clarke closes her eyes and lets time tick away, feels him turn to face her more than he’s not facing her, but that’s okay. Whatever it is he’s trying to figure out, she can ask him the next time they’re alone. For now, she wants him to rest as much as he can, and she wants him to stay with his family, for his family, for her, and for himself too.

 

…

 

The second that door swings open even by an inch, Clarke and Murphy are jumping to their feet. She’d been almost dozing off against Bellamy’s chest, and maybe, given five minutes more, she might have fallen asleep, but when Wells steps out of the med ward, all thought of rest goes out the window. The non-existent window.

He paces quickly towards them, and Clarke opens her mouth, her mind trying to catch up to the dozen questions in line on her tongue, but she can’t say anything before he is scooping her up and squeezing her so tightly that she genuinely can’t breathe.

Wells crashes his head on to her shoulder and his face is wet, and he makes a sound into the shield of her hair. Clarke chokes, because the airflow is dangerously stilted. He rocks her for what feels like forever.

“Wells?” Murphy asks, his voice carrying a tone that she has heard only once- the night before the hospital.

“She’s fine,” he says, like he’s angry about it, into Clarke’s shoulder, not letting go.

“She’s what?”

“She’s fine,”

Octavia is up and pushing past Murphy before anyone can actually process that, and Clarke tries to get out of his embrace so that she can follow him, but he doesn’t hear her.

He needs her, like Murphy needed her, like Octavia needed her.

She responds, rubbing her hands over his back in what she hopes is a soothing gesture.

“Okay,” Clarke hums, her feet buzzing with the want to run in after the others. She knows, might be the only one who knows, how much Wells cares about Raven, how much he has cared for her and for how long. “Okay, you did it.”

He shakes his head. She can’t remember the last time she had to take care of him like this. Probably when they were children, when he got called to the principal’s office to learn of his mother’s aneurism.

“Her leg Clarke. It’s fucked. We had to brace it, but I don’t know…”

“She’s clean?”

“As far as we know. Tsing said there’s no sign of infection, none of the ones that would be there by now.”

“Then you did it,”

“The damage isn’t going to just fix itself,” he says, still clinging on to her. He’ll be embarrassed by this tomorrow; he’ll be ashamed that he has done this in front of Roan and Bellamy- who she’s pretty sure is still here- but that is tomorrow’s problem. “She might not be able to walk again without the brace.”

“Wells, she’s going to live,”

He is silent until he whispers so faintly that she is worried she’s just imagining the way he speaks. There’s no way she’d be able to hear him if she were any further away.

“I was terrified. I was so, so scared. I couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d never know; I think I was wrong about it Clarke, it being dangerous,”

Maybe he was.

“Is she awake?”

“Yeah,”

Clarke asks if she can go and see her, because he clearly can’t let go without her voicing something about it, and Wells unfolds himself from around her almost instantly, like he’d forgotten that she can’t see Raven from where they are, that she hasn’t actually had the chance to see her yet.

When they separate, she touches a hand to his cheek to wipe away the patchy streaks trailing down them. He looks her in the eye, her brother, and she can see his broken heart in the swollen light of his pupils. She can see the impossibility of his love for Raven, how he thinks it is out of reach and how he knows responsibility and preservation comes before desire.

She rubs a thumb over his cheekbone until it dries completely. Then she breathes deeply and lets her hand fall, and Wells’ gaze falls on something on the floor a few feet behind her.

Clarke turns to see Bellamy in the same place she left him, his eyes completely focused on the floor between his bent up legs, trailing fingers over his knees as a distraction. She wonders if he is waiting for her, or if he’s trying to figure out how to stand up.

Walking over to him, Clarke figures she can just kill two birds with one stone, and she reaches out an arm for him to take, and he seems surprised when he notices it. His expression is clouded over with something indecipherable but something in hers must be asking for his help, because he takes her hand, pretends she is actually lifting him up when he leans none of his weight on her, and he doesn’t let go of it when he is standing.

Clarke drifts on her feet, exhaustion starting to take over, and Bellamy hears her because he is the one who leads them in Wells’ path, and he keeps her upright when she sees Raven, on the opposite side of the rows of beds to his, sat upright on top of the thinning blanket, talking tiredly but animatedly.

Clarke knows when she gets noticed, because Raven’s face breaks out into that effortless smile, the one that makes her lips look so delicately rosied and her teeth look like fluorescent bulbs. Her leg is strapped up in a blue mold- it would be a cast if it had been shaped by something soft, but it is made of metal and it is barred like scaffolding.

That knife cut deep, deep enough to cause possibly permanent nerve damage.

Murphy is practically passed out in the chair that he has pulled up to Raven’s bed, the sight of her probably enough to give him the reprieve to rest.

“I told you to take care of yourself,” Clarke says when Bellamy holds her through the way to the foot of the bed.

Raven doesn’t flinch, quite the opposite.

“How many times do I have to say it Griffin? I’m not always going to follow your orders,”

But it wasn’t an order. It was a favor.

“Look at what happens when you don’t,”

Raven’s lips twist into a smirk as she shakes her head fondly, and Clarke hasn’t really had a perception of personal space since they came back, she’s not going to bother trying to fathom one now. Instead, she lets Bellamy’s hand fall to his side, and she maneuvers around Murphy’s stretched out, sleeping form, to get to her friend.

Raven stretches up awkwardly, the pillows not giving Clarke much access to reach around her back. Still, she hugs Raven with all of the fervor that Wells used to hug her, and she squeezes her eyes shut tightly to keep from crying. It’s the fatigue, she tries to tell herself. It’s the uncertainty of the past few hours.

“I’m okay,” Raven hums, like she has been granted a miracle. Maybe she has.

“We’re going to have to work on our goodbyes,” Clarke whispers back, thinking back to how useless they’d been with what Raven had thought were their last moments together.

“Someday. Let’s do that someday,”

Someday sounds far enough away, for now. It sounds like enough to give them some relief from the pressure hanging down over all of them.

Roan is over at the other end of the hall talking to a medic that Clarke can’t remember the name of- thinks it begins with an E- and she pities the restraints around his chest that come with his job.

Bellamy’s greeting is a whole lot more awkward, but Octavia’s wet laugh is enough to break any discomfort, her simple contentedness of things slowing down beaming through like the candles on the dresser.

Clarke takes in the way he asks if Raven needs anything with his hands behind his back, his gaze flitting around all five of them to let them know the offer is open to anyone, and his refusal to take the chair that she gestures for him to sit in when she has perched on the edge of the bed.

“I’m okay standing,” he lets her know, his shin grazing her calf from where she is debating wrapping her leg around his.

He is being shy again, a precursor to his distracted fixation on something absent. But Octavia is so tired that she is rambling about nothing, and Raven is so relieved to be alive that she is entertaining it without any sort of complaint. So Clarke takes the time to listen, to relish in a moment of quiet after so much chaos.

And after an hour, when the sun is starting to think about coming back up, and she starts focusing too much on the loose threads at the corner of the blanket, Bellamy slips his hand on to her shoulder, and squeezes it to let her know that he is still here, that they’re all still here.

Octavia is the one to call time, when she yawns for the eighth time and when Raven finally decides to call her out on it.

“You’re right,” the youngest of them sighs, both arms above her head. “I should go see Lincoln and let him know.”

“O you’re going to bed,” Bellamy shakes his head.

“And I will,”

She barely even tries to wave him off.

Clarke is hesitant to go. Wells has said that they’re going to do some tests with Raven tomorrow, to see how mobile her leg will be even with the brace. She doesn’t look worried, and neither does he all too much, but Clarke is concerned. She is terrified that her friend won’t be able to walk again and leaving her with that looming over their heads doesn’t quite feel right.

Still, the sun is rising, and Roan drops by for a check-in with Raven, his face pale at the sight of the cast but his voice still the same as ever. He lets Murphy and Clarke off duty, since they’re already entering into the morning and they’re not going to be of any use without sleep; the rest of them aren’t scheduled in for tomorrow anyway.

“I can stay,” Clarke says quietly, when Octavia is getting ready to take off and when Bellamy is shoving Murphy around to wake him up.

Raven shakes her head softly. There is a faint blush on her cheeks, enough to make Clarke raise an eyebrow.

“Wells said he’d stay down here tonight,” she hums, so as not to attract the attention of anyone else. Clarke doesn’t quite know what that means, and she isn’t sure she wants to know anymore. “Seriously, Clarke, I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I am,”

“I’ll come back in the morning. First thing,”

“Okay,” Raven grins, relenting.

The dust may be settling, but Clarke’s veins still feel like live wires. She doesn’t understand how Raven is taking this so well, but that is a question for tomorrow, when they can actually fathom answers.

She detangles herself from Raven and the bed, watches as Bellamy says goodnight and as he tugs Murphy away by the scruff of his neck.

Clarke joins Octavia’s side, rounding the corner of the bed, and she nods briefly to Wells, who won’t meet her eye now that she knows he’s not leaving any time soon. If it is what is good for Raven, he should stay. But she knows that Murphy picks up on it, and she is glad that Bellamy is pushing him forward, because he probably wouldn’t be able to do it himself.

She waves one last time to Raven, who she is sort of seeing double of with how tired they’re all becoming.

“I can’t believe it worked,” Octavia mutters, when they follow Bellamy and Murphy through the doorway. The fluorescence is too bright out here now. “She’s…”

“A genius,”

“Yeah,”

“How are you feeling?” Clarke asks, because Octavia got thrown into this the second she got back, she definitely hasn’t rested in a while.

“I’m tired,” she answers through a yawn, holding on to the banister of the stairwell so that she can use it to pull her up. “I’m gonna try and get Lincoln to give me a massage.”

Bellamy doesn’t turn around, but he doesn’t have to in order to make his outrage known.

“Octavia,” he hisses from in front of them.

“Stop eavesdropping Bell,” she doesn’t seem uncomfortable, brushing off the cringe of her older brother with ease like she has had to do this so many times, which she probably has.

She leaves them on the ground floor to go and pick Lincoln up from his watch shift. She tries to give Murphy a subtle one armed hug on her way past, but he brushes her off which Clarke knew is something he would do. She kisses Bellamy on the cheek, whispers something in his ear, and holds on to Clarke’s shoulders as a ‘thank you’- probably for holding it together for the rest of them.

Octavia doesn’t bounce away, she walks leisurely, not enough energy for anything else.

Getting up to Ark floor after that is slightly awkward, since it is just the three of them and Murphy isn’t exactly stable right now. She is wary that he could see Wells’ reaction, could see the blush on Raven’s cheeks when she said she wouldn’t be alone. She is wary that he’s not going to process it, because she sure wouldn’t. She is wary that he’s just going to fixate on it inwardly until it eats him up.

Bellamy can see it too. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be practically walking Murphy up the stairs.

They get to Murphy’s door first, and Bellamy steps away to let her say goodnight to him, to let her see if he needs anything without having to risk his pride.

“He’s staying with her,” Murphy says, before she can ask anything. His voice is low and croaky, like he’s recovering from a cold, and he speaks with a drawl that isn’t friendly. It’s aggressive and unpredictable. “He’s staying-”

He runs his tongue over his teeth, as though to clean them of a bad taste. Clarke nods, because he’s not wrong.

“With her.” He finishes through the bad taste.

He sounds like a failed man. She had been wondering how long it would take for things like this to get complicated. Perhaps now that they’re not all fixed on her love life, now is the time to step back and look at their own. She needs to speak with Raven, before things can get any worse.

“Do you need-”

“Goodnight Clarke,” he shuts the door in her face before she can finish her sentence, but at least he isn’t ignoring her, at least he said goodnight. She’ll give him the night to be alone; he needs it and he deserves it.

He was her friend when she felt like she had no one, on more than one occasion. She’ll be his through this.

When Clarke turns around, Bellamy is leaning against the wall a few doors down- outside hers, she notices. He is watching the opposite wall in a way that says he is lost in his own head, and he jumps when she approaches, clearly somewhere else.

“Hi,” she says, even though they hadn’t really separated.

Bellamy smiles sadly, just the corner of his mouth lifting, once he has recovered. He opens his mouth to say something, breathes in wetly through his mouth, then his teeth snap shut on second thought.

“You should get some sleep,” he hums, his head ducking as though he is relenting to something, shy smile on his face because that something is something only he knows, almost embarrassed, almost laughing at himself.

She really should get some sleep.

Clarke nods and feels her shoulders drift towards him because her body knows what she wants more than her own mind does.

She turns in towards her door, looks at the height of it, which yesterday, didn’t feel like a problem. Now it is terrifying. She has held herself strong this entire time, she has been strong all freaking day. She doesn’t want to have to be strong right now.

“Bellamy?” she calls as he takes a step away. Her neck jolts from spinning so quickly.

“What is it?”

“Can I…” she can’t go into that room right now. It is hard enough to do that when Raven is out on a mission, let alone when she knows for a fact that she is merely a few doors down, probably in pain, probably terrified of the memory of being so close to infection.

The guilt of that sinks in like a punctured lifeboat, how Clarke hadn’t even asked if that is manageable, which it obviously isn’t going to be.

No, she can’t go inside. She can’t sleep with Raven’s empty bed above hers, with springs that should be squeaking, and Raven’s clothes littered all over the floor like breadcrumbs that lead to disaster.

“I can’t be in there,” and she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. “I’d stay in Wells’ bed but…” but Murphy needs space, and she’s not going to waltz in there and take over. She couldn’t do that either.

She chances looking to Bellamy, scared to see caution about the idea of spending the night together on his face. It’d be completely appropriate, given how shy everything between them is, she just can’t be alone right now, and part of Clarke is worried he’d be repulsed by the thought of sharing his space with her.

“Come on,” he nods his head back, gesturing to his door, his expression untraceable. He doesn’t seem _repulsed_ , but there’s something…

She follows as he moves away. Once he has shut the door behind him, they might not be able to open it back up from between them. Clarke makes sure to get inside before that can happen, and he flicks the dubious light bulb on without looking to the switch.

Her back is pressed to the wall when he looks around the room. She was in here only hours ago, so was he, but he is acting as though this is his first time stepping in here, ever.

“Where do you normally sleep?” he asks, gesturing to his bed which is oddly fitting. _With you_. But that is not what he’s offering, and Clarke knows it.

His bed is the bottom one, and the idea of sleeping up high right now is more daunting than anything. She could fall. Her dreams are violent enough, she could throw herself right out of the shield of a mattress. Still, he is offering her his room, she’s not going to take his bed too.

There is no sheet or blanket on the top one, just a flat, yellowed pillow without a case on it.

“I can take the-”

“Not what I asked,” he waves a hand, cutting her off like he knows she’s only trying to be polite.

“Top bunk,” Clarke tells him, otherwise he’ll do something stupid like take the floor. She can brave the top bunk for tonight. If it’s his, she can brave it.

His head bobs up and down and Bellamy wipes his mouth.

“Okay,” he strides over to his bed so aggressively, like he thinks it’s going to take him hours to get there, like he doesn’t understand his own power. He gathers the quilt up in his arms. “Here, have this. I don’t need it. There’s no sheet but…”

He is still trying to figure out how to get over that hurdle, but it’s almost painful to watch.

“It’s fine,” she rushes, walking closer to help him get the heavy blanket on to the top bed. “Thank you.”

He doesn’t say anything, so distracted. Maybe he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing, because there is clearly a part of him that’s not present.

Something snaps inside him.

“You need something to sleep in,” he practically shouts. She’d laugh if she weren’t so tired, so nervous, so drained.

It’s true. Clarke is still in her heavy duty boots, the vest top that goes low enough down her back that it won’t get stuck to her skin if she gets too sweaty. She could go to her room, grab a spare shirt, but he is already jogging to the cabinet in the place where hers is, and diving through the drawers that hold clothes still yet to be refolded.

She leans awkwardly on to the metal pole of the bedframe, leans away when it starts creaking under her weight. The joints of it are rusted and coming loose; she doesn’t take it personally. Clarke busies herself with leaving her bow in the corner of the room, her arrows down beside it. She hopes they don’t spill out, but she’s not about to hang them up, or put them in an obvious place. That’d be like taking over.

“Here,” Bellamy clears his throat. He hands her a t-shirt she doesn’t think she’s seen on him yet- although she can’t be sure, since there are only so many shades of green- and a pair of grey sweatpants that are going to be way too big for her. She can’t sleep in them. She’d melt. “I’ll let you get changed.”

He’s out of the door before Clarke can so much as blink, and she wonders where he’s actually going to go.

She has got no idea where to leave her clothes when she takes them off, so she folds them and places them in the same corner as her weapon. She doesn’t bother with the sweatpants- the t-shirt is long enough to cover the awkward part of her thighs. There is a fake pocket over her heart, with a stitched navy logo on it; she tries to read it but she’s looking at it the wrong way around and gives up not long after.

Debating with herself whether to open the door and let him know it’s okay to come back in, or to let him do so on his own time, Clarke decides to wimp out and do both. She knocks shallowly on the door and sprints to the ladder, to climb up it before he can enter.

She lands so heavily that the mattress creaks and the whole bed weans, and Bellamy doesn’t even notice.

“Oh,” she says, when she realizes he’s still fully dressed. “I should go, so that you can-”

“It’s fine,” he shrugs. “I’ll just sleep in this.”

She wonders what he normally sleeps in, considering they’ve never actually done this before. Not in a room on their own. Not with doors and quiet and… well, privacy.

She doesn’t lie down until Bellamy turns the light off, and he takes his shoes off in the dark.

Clarke rests her head on the yellow, oddly stained pillow when she hears him do the same, his shuffling easy to map in her own head. His breathing is so heavy, so here when there is no light. She can feel his eyes as though they’re on her, as though the mattress is translucent, as though he can see straight through it to the back of her head.

She stares up at the ceiling, her fingers interlocked with each other over her stomach. Closing her eyes feels impossible.

Her watch doesn’t make a sound loud enough to be noticeable, but it is ticking away each second. Each ounce of time where neither of them are sleeping, just breathing into the shadow of a room.

It is the kind of quiet that would suit a record player, one that has a needle and scratches vinyl when it plays. Violins tainted by feedback in the ambience.

“Bellamy?” she whispers, scared to distort violins in the background.

“Yeah?” he asks instantly, like he has been waiting for her to say something through all of the silence- his voice is delicate too.

“I don’t normally sleep up here,”

It’s not like any sort of lie she’d tell him could ever last, but she feels miles away from anyone, which doesn’t make sense since he is just down there. She doesn’t want him to be ‘down there’. She doesn’t want to be ‘up here’.

He sighs, but he sounds amused by it.

“Get down here then,”

She tries to climb down the ladder without accidentally flashing him, but the worrying is for nothing since he is sitting up, leaning over his knees so that his feet can rest on the floor. What is he thinking about?

Clarke sits on the bed next to him, her arm brushing his. They aren’t staring at anything but pixie dust in the dark; maybe they are staring at everything.

“I’m sorry,” she hums, when he doesn’t say anything, or make a move to get up or to lie back down.

She feels him turn his head to look at her, but she is caught on a bit of dust that she doesn’t want to lose track of. His gaze is curious, endeared.

Her eyes feel so drowsy.

“What on Earth do you have to be sorry for?” he asks slowly, like he is making sure he’s heard that right.

“I don’t even know,”

Her voice is unsteady; she sounds pathetic, like she is running out of air.

Clarke shoves both of her hands over her face, swamping her eyes so that she can close them, so that she doesn’t have to risk having them run. Also, so he can’t see her if they do.

“This is just…”

“Hard,”

“Yeah,”

“You never see it,”- Bellamy isn’t angry, almost disappointed. It is going to take thirty seconds before her skeleton folds in on itself and there is a ticking bomb on her wrist counting towards the breakdown. He speaks thoughtfully, as though he has all the time in the world. She can’t work out which way the counting goes, whether it is up or down.

“See what?” Clarke chokes out reluctantly. Sleep is calling for her so irresistibly, but she can’t reach it. She can’t touch it. She is sat, hunched, like they are leaning over a campfire for warmth. They are literally running from sleep.

Her leg starts itching, the kind that won’t ever get relief.

“How you carry us,” sometimes, she is startled by how low his voice can get. She has never heard anything like it. “Every one of us. You were the one to hold us up today. You’re always the one-”

The dam breaks before Clarke can even get to it. She is glad she already had her hands over her face, because at least she can catch the tears as they fall. For some people, crying is cathartic. It is like a reset button, like it’ll fix a glitch in the system. It works like that sometimes for Clarke too, but not right now.

Now, she knows what she is. She’s an idiot, crying for a reason she can’t find, crying for the suffering of other people, convincing herself it is hers too.

“Shit,” he hisses from her side. It’s the first time he has sounded scared. “I didn’t mean to make you-”

His arm wraps around her shoulder in one swoop, and she holds on to her eyes like she is wearing a mask across her face as he pulls her into his chest. The crook it shapes her waist into his verging on painful, and there isn’t a way to lean into him where it won’t feel awkward.

“I’m sorry,” she whimpers into his shirt, rubbing so hard at her eyes that they are probably already bloody shot. His other hand comes up to her head and Bellamy draws small circles over her hair that are firm and reassuring, but don’t quite get through. “I’m sorry.”

She has so much to be sorry for. She told Raven to look after herself. She told Octavia to be there for her. She told Murphy to grow up. She told Bellamy not to fall in love. And what has she done? She hasn’t done any of those things. She has been a hypocrite and a liar and a coward and here she is, blocking him from rest.

Bellamy turns into her fully, his knee knocking her hip, and he pulls Clarke away to take her face in his hands. Too many hands, too many hands. She hates how the rest of the world looks when she is crying. It looks like it is being cast through a puddle, melted around a puddle, and it is dreary and disappointing that way.

He is maneuvering her around him. He picks her legs up by the calves and he drapes them over his lap, not quite pulling her into it, just enough to… do something.

“Clarke,” his fingers are wound around her bare skin, her legs that haven’t been shaved in months. The t-shirt is probably riding up obscenely. It’s a shame that she is crying. It’s a shame that she doesn’t know why she is crying.

What is there to say? What can he say?

“Please,”

Please what?

“Clarke,” Bellamy says again, like her name would ever mean anything to her. He knew it was Clarke with an E before she had to tell him. This shirt and this room, this bed smells so much like him, and home is a running tap.

She can’t grasp the time to breathe in between all of the sobs, and it is becoming ridiculous. Whoever is next door to him can probably hear all of this. She is on the edge of hyperventilating.

He is trying to get closer. It’s what she would do, if this were the other way around. His hand moves up to her waist, to pull her more into his lap. When she is sat, in a crumbled ball, on top of his legs, the t-shirt rising so much that it’s not a barrier between them, just his clothes now, her feet hit the metal pole together.

His chest brushes against hers and Bellamy rocks her to the side to get her to calm down, tucking his chin against her shoulder and turning his face so that his forehead rests against her temple, so that his nose brushes her cheek, forcing her hands away.

Clarke grinds her teeth together, mewling behind them. She must look like she is in pain; he must be terrified.

“I can’t,” she grits out, in agony, like those gas cannisters that are designed to carry oxygen all the way to the bottom of the sea. A sea she has never seen.

It must take an hour.

It must take several hours. It takes the rest of the morning to stop and Clarke knows the sun will be peaking when the bawling drifts into something else, something slower. Why it takes so long, she doesn’t know, but Bellamy keeps her here as they are, for as long as it takes.

His legs are probably dead. It wouldn’t have been strange to move back and rest against the wall as he holds her, but he doesn’t. He stays exactly where they are, holding his own back straight and around her frame, and keeps Clarke cupped in his arms, face turned into hers.

Her watch might beep soon to tell her that she has got something to do. Her watch doesn’t know that Roan cancelled her shift for today, and it won’t remind her to go and check on Raven, which is something she’ll have to do soon because she’ll be waking up any time now.

And it is only now, when she starts sniveling, that Clarke slumps against his body, because she physically can’t hold herself up anymore, and his shoulder houses her forehead so effortlessly. He leans his head on top of hers, stroking her hair from its root to her back, and she hears as he breathes out coolly, relieved.

“I’ve got you,” he says, nothing more than a whisper because he hasn’t spoken for hours. She wonders what he can see from where he is. “I’ve got you.”

“Bellamy?” she sounds so young, so stupidly small. He squeezes her waist in answer, to let Clarke know that he has got her from everywhere. “Can I stay here?”

She shouldn’t ask it. She has no right, and she is selfish to ask it. She needs to go and find Raven. She needs to go and find Murphy. But the whole world froze for a night, and catching up to it is a straining, exhaustive process. There is no way she’s going to be able to move right now.

“You’re here,” he hums back, confused but so patient.

“Here,” she says again, so that he understands that she is not asking about his room, or his bed, just him. Just him and his hold and his t-shirt and the darkness that gives them pixie dust so graciously. “Here,” she reaches up for him, her hands moving from her sides for the first time since the beginning. They wrap around his neck, clinging to him like a sloth clings to the branch of a tree.

“Always,” he tells her, sounding sad that she even had to ask. She chokes again; he broke the deal. The unspoken agreement that they aren’t mentioning forever. He is promising time he can’t give, and there needs to be something angry about that.

But Clarke can’t bring herself to be mad at it. Not right now, when so much of her is gone to be with sleep.

“Rae,” is the only thing she can get out, needing him to know that she can’t stay here.

“She’ll be fine Clarke. She’s gonna be okay,”

“You carry me,” Clarke says, her cheeks so patchy and raw. “I don’t know, but you carry me, and I’m sorry.”

He shushes her calmly, relieving her of incoherence.

She can feel a tear trickling its way down the far side of her face, escaping what she thought was a dried landscape after so many hours of rainfall, and Clarke doesn’t have the energy to wipe it away. It hovers on the corner of her jaw, making itself known with its tacky, tickly presence.

She is falling asleep when Bellamy presses his closed lips to her neck, to cut the tear off from falling any more than it has, warmth in the way that a pillow could never be.

There may be good people left in this world, but if there is one thing for certain, he is the good of them. And his lips are crystals of sugar, and his arms are shields.

And he is the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Much as I love you, don't let me love you,'  
> \- Moon Love, Frank Sinatra
> 
> Your comments are genuinely too nice. I have big emotional breakdowns each time. Jsyk.


	43. Melting darling, and I can't let go

Clarke jerks awake from a dreamless sleep, completely out of it, every part of her body weighted like she has been strapped down to something. Her head is on top of a pillow, one she can’t remember getting to. If she tries to sit up, she’s pretty sure that the air will just push her back down.

This isn’t her bed. She knows that from the scent surrounding her: decidedly masculine, much warmer than she’s used to, and so familiar that it hurts. There’s no glare coming from anywhere, but she tightens the lock of her eyes, squinting already closed eyelids.

Yawning, she nestles into the pillow, giving herself a second to imprint the smell to the back of her mind, and then Clarke opens her eyes, blinks a couple of times to adjust to the dark that she didn’t expect the room to be swamped in.

Her legs are being lifted by something. She looks down, is strangely unsurprised by the sight of Bellamy over at the other end of the bed, his back pressed against the wall, his head hanging painfully forward as he sleeps. Her feet are just past his lap and his hands are balancing on her shins like he has been holding on to them.

She doesn’t mean to wake him, really she doesn’t. But yesterday pours back in almost instantly, a sleepless night and the promise she made to go back, falling like a brick.

“Shit,” she hisses, gentleness forgotten as she strains to see the face of her watch in the darkness. Bellamy stirs a little, before the thread of his neck can be cut, lifting his head drowsily. “What time is it?”

Her voice is barely there; there’s a patch of her throat that feels uncomfortable and dry.

“Clarke,” Bellamy says, and he should not be allowed to say her name before he says anything else after he’s woken up. It should be a rule. She’s not sure there’s going to be a stronger catalyst for the heat sent to the pit of her stomach than the roughness of his voice in the morning. She stills to watch him run a hand through his hair, like it’ll wake him up some more. He looks like he’s barely slept. “You’re okay. Roan gave you the day off.”

He fidgets a little under her legs, slumping down so that he can use the wall as more of a pillow, pulling her closer like she’s a blanket.

“Not to sleep the entire time,” Clarke sighs, disappointed in herself for taking that much. She swings her legs from off of his lap and stands shakily to her feet. His reaction is slow, not lacking in frustration. “I need to see Raven.”

“Clarke-”

“She needs me Bellamy,”

She doesn’t know what she’s doing, but he stands, a step or two behind her, and follows Clarke to the corner that she left her boots in last night. He yanks the left one out of her hands before she can get her foot anywhere near it.

“No,” he says, his voice still nowhere close to normal. “She doesn’t.”

“Give me my shoe,”

“You’re still wearing my shirt,”

Clarke looks down to her chest, takes in a shade of green that isn’t hers, that looks almost grey without light. The sleeves reach her elbows, the hem of it grazing the top of her thigh- he lets her know it as though it’s something that will keep her here.

“Your point?” she doesn’t want to admit that it would be a bit weird to walk around the base wearing just this and some walking boots. She doesn’t have time to worry about it.

His shoulders give when he steps closer, his face unreadable because she can’t really see it.

“So we’re not going to talk about last night?”

Last night? Last night.

Last night feels so far away, she can barely remember it. It is trapped under a layer of something that she can’t address.

“No,”

“Clarke don’t do this,”

She takes her boot back, moves back to the bed to get the other one on too, and doesn’t bother lacing them up, just tucks the chewed strings into her socks.

“Do what?”

“Run,” he says as though it’s obvious, wiping a hand over his face tiredly.

“I can’t stay,”

“Yes you can,”

“Murphy needs someone,” she remembers.

“So do you,”

He catches her hand at the light switch, his grip lagging. He pulls her away from it once she’s managed to turn the light on. It flickers unbearably, too bright when it is on, too dark when it is off. Both of them need a second to adjust.

Clarke fists her hand, not letting him drop her wrist.

“Last night was pathetic,” she tells him, meeting his eye to try to show him that she’s fine. That she should keep moving. “I let everything get to me and I shouldn’t have.”

“It wasn’t pathetic,”

“I was exhausted,”

“You were upset Clarke. Don’t ignore it,” he brings her into his chest, to let her know that he’s still here. His eyes are heavy, the light in the room reflecting back out of them at a stunning rate.

“Stop,” she says, her legs threatening to give out. “Please.”

Bellamy quietens too. She almost steps on his toes when she falls into him some more. His face is rock hard- his eyes are pretty much the opposite.

“You’re scaring me,” he whispers, thumb running over her pulse. Every bit of him running over her pulse.

“I’m fine,” she sighs, trying to pull her hand away, but his eyes get locked on to something along her palm. She stills when his face morphs into something else, something other than frustration, and Clarke follows his gaze.

“Clarke-”

“It happens,” she tries to reason, because it does sometimes. There are three crescent shapes pressed into her hand, painted red, ink filling negative space, and there is dried blood along the tip of her fingernails. She wouldn’t do it if she could feel it. Of course she wouldn’t.

“You call this fine?” Bellamy asks, voice faster now, sleep forgotten. He holds her hand into her face as though she doesn’t know what it is, but Clarke didn’t know she was doing it. Last night was a fall, and she was grabbing, clutching, clinging to whatever she could.

No. She wouldn’t call this fine if it were marked upon anyone else. She won’t try to call this fine on herself.

Clarke closes her mouth, because she has nothing to say. Instead, she watches Bellamy’s face as it transforms into several different expressions at once, anger enough to make the sun wilt.

He sighs heavily, looks away like he’s disgusted with her, but doesn’t drop the wrist.

“Stay here,” he says, his tone leaving no room for argument. He is biting so hard on to his jaw that she’s surprised his teeth aren’t already broken. She opens her mouth to say something, to ask where he’s going, but he cuts her off. “No. Come with me.”

He’s swinging the door open, tugging her through it, and Clarke gets reminded of those hurricanes that would pass over her town in the middle of October, how they’d go out of their way to put a stop to everything, to break and fix whatever they wanted to.

She’d watch from her window as trees got torn from their roots, as roofs could slide away from houses like a cake left wonky, and how roads could turn into rivers.

“Bellamy, I’m wearing your shirt,” she reminds him, having to take two steps each time he takes one just to keep up. The clinical light of the hall makes her legs look stark white, and she prays that no one comes out here right now.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t react at all, and Clarke rolls her eyes because deep down she knew he wouldn’t. When he feels the need to do something, nothing will stop him.

She doesn’t expect to come to such an abrupt stop so soon, so she goes crashing into his shoulder when he halts at Murphy’s door, and he holds her hand strong to keep her steady. Bellamy raps impatiently at the door, as though just their presence on the other side of it should have been enough to get Murphy to open it.

“Woah, Blake you look like shit,” Murphy smirks when he leans through the doorway. Clarke slumps against the wall, partly to escape his notice, partly because she’s still exhausted from last night.

“Thanks,” he opens his mouth to keep speaking, then he reconsiders and pauses before he asks, “You doing okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Bellamy gives up with being gentle.

“Have you been to the infirmary?”

“I just got back,”

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s walking,” Murphy says slowly, almost suspicious. “She’s smiling. It’s Raven, I don’t know what else you’d expect.”

That seems to be enough for Bellamy, because he shifts to look at her, his eyebrows raised pointedly. He jerks his head towards Murphy. “See?”

Clarke tried to fold her arms over her chest, but it’s a little hard when his fingers are linked into hers, almost subconsciously. So she’s had to settle for keeping one arm around her waist, as though that’ll stop Murphy- or anyone- from seeing her in such a state.

It doesn’t stop him. He leans further out of the doorway to see who Bellamy is talking to, and he takes his time looking her up and down, his sly smirk growing exponentially in that obnoxious, teenage boy sort of way. If Bellamy wasn’t holding her hand so firmly, she’d punch him in the face.

“Morning,” Murphy beams suggestively, leering close. He’s not even trying to hide it.

She gives him her middle finger in return, ignores the thought of what her hair must look like, how much that makes this whole situation worse.

Bellamy completely ignores it.

“So there’s nothing to worry about?” he asks, around Murphy’s wink.

“She’s not going to mind if you two have other things to take care of,” he scoffs, shaking his head knowingly at Clarke. “She’s not alone anyway.”

He adds that with an unhealthy dose of snark, his mask, and Clarke gets reminded that he spent the night knowing that Wells and Raven were down there together.

She doesn’t have the chance to ask him about that- she probably shouldn’t anyway, considering Bellamy is right here, and Murphy might trust him, but not with something as vulnerable as that.

Bellamy, being the hurricane that he is, nods. Because he clearly has no idea how to approach that with Murphy, just like Murphy has no idea how to approach that with Murphy.

He nods and he turns, bringing Clarke’s hand with him and leading the way.

They get stopped by the return of his voice.

“Roan’s calling a meeting at midnight,”

“Midnight?”

“He’ll want to leave first thing tomorrow morning,” Clarke rolls her eyes, sympathy inching in for him. He doesn’t stop, not ever.

“Have fun you two,”

Bellamy does take the time to shove him back into his room, using just the flick of his wrist and Murphy is losing his balance. Even with everything going on around her, Clarke has to admit that the sight of that does make her laugh. Murphy’s attempt to play it off makes him push against the door, slamming it with an echo that rings through the hall.

Clarke is watching Bellamy once the door almost hits his nose, biting her lip back to keep from actually laughing.

And then he turns on her, and he’s _still_ holding her hand, and everything else comes rushing back in.

He doesn’t speak. He just nods his head, and because he could be pointing to a dozen different places to go, Clarke can only stand confused, and a little worried about how pissed off he actually is.

Bellamy isn’t impatient when he pulls her forward, and they walk into the communal bathroom like there is a vacuum within it, sucking them through the doorway lined with mold and damp.

He pulls Clarke over to the mirrors, and to the sinks beneath them, and his breath is heavy and spotless when it lands against the glass. She avoids her own reflection as much as possible, but when Clarke lands in front of one, her eyes become stuck.

She’s never seen herself in his clothes, in fabric that touches his skin more than it has touched hers, and the sight of it… it’s addictive. The shirt doesn’t fit. Of course it doesn’t fit. That doesn’t mean it’s not addictive.

Clarke takes her eyes in, the way they are wide open and blue. Quite blue. She doesn’t see them often. She’s not too sure what they’re supposed to mean either.

Bellamy brings her closer to the mirror, and she notices the way one of the sleeves is hanging lower on her shoulder than the other. Adjusting it with one arm free, she still makes sure to watch what he’s doing.

He turns both the taps of the center sink on, even though the water coming out of each is the same temperature, and there’s no way to catch water from both at once. Everything about him calms when the water starts running, like the taps are spilling something more, something she can’t see.

In fact, his gentle touch becomes even softer, and he doesn’t push Clarke away, he brings her closer, so that they can huddle around the cracked ceramic, so that the mirror only holds the two of them and nothing more.

Clarke watches him from the mirror, because her face is so close to his, their cheeks practically touching, that she can’t really turn to see him subtly. His jaw is hinged tightly, as it is more often than it isn’t, and he’s focused on the basin below the both of them.

Clarke feels, as opposed to sees, the icy water trickle over her hand, winding down her knuckles and spreading through the lines in her palm, and the skin of Bellamy’s hand is not soft, but who cares? Skin is exactly what skin should be. Skin is a barrier, a shield. Isn’t it good that he’s got the roughest skin she’s ever felt? That it is the thickest?

Skin is armor in the same way his shoulders are crutches, in the same way his eyes are skylights, in the same way his heart is a vinyl record player, or a sonogram that has one of those consuming shapes, the ones that threaten to fall without end.

His skin is perfect skin. And his touch. His touch is the way he speaks in matters that don’t have words. And he speaks with control and with sophistication, and with softness.

So when he runs his thumb over the place where she has cut herself, it doesn’t hurt. He wipes away blood that shouldn’t be there, until the crescents fade to something so much less harmful, and he cleans the edges of her nails away, forcing water to run red, forcing chill to warm with her dried blood.

She watches his focus, his immeasurable focus, and his eyelashes are something to envy, his skin misty in the reflection.

“I’m sorry,” Bellamy whispers, startling Clarke out of the silence only carried by a running tap, or two. His voice is heavy, and loaded with guilt, and she tries so hard to figure it out for herself what he is apologizing for. She comes up empty, and he carries on minutes later, when she doesn’t respond. “I should have stopped this.”

Clarke still needs time to understand; it is his burning gaze that makes her realize he’s not angry at her. She wonders what she could ever do to make him angry at her in the way he is angry at himself. He thinks it’s his fault. He thinks that Clarke not being able to find an outlet to pain- which shouldn’t have been there last night- is his fault.

“Bellamy,” she starts, her hand numb from the cold. He keeps wiping away at it, even though there isn’t really any blood left.

He shakes his head shallowly, saying ‘not now’. Saying ‘I’ve done enough’.

She doesn’t speak until they’re back inside his room, her hand still uncomfortable, his in his pockets now that there is no reason to have them somewhere else. They’re both quiet, painfully so, but it feels obvious to come back inside here. It doesn’t even feel like there’s a choice in the matter.

It might be hours past midday, but it feels like the witching hour. Like they’re the only two awake in the entire building.

Bellamy leans on the door to close it behind him, Clarke’s a few steps ahead. Each time she comes inside here, it feels new. She looks around the walls, in case they have changed in the last twenty minutes. They haven’t.

The second Clarke turns back around to face him, the top of his head is pressed to the door, and she barely has time to see something snap in him before he is striding towards her, as though he has forgotten something.

She yelps when Bellamy grabs the edge of his t-shirt in between his fingers, when he pulls her to meet him, still unaware of his own strength. Clarke manages to catch herself before she goes tumbling into his chest, a good thing too, because she’s not sure what bits of this he has thought through, or if he understands how close this brings them.

Maybe Bellamy has forgotten that she’s not wearing anything under this. Knowing that he can reach for the end of the top without even having to straighten his arms properly is unnerving, and he doesn’t let go once her toe touches his.

Clarke clears her throat, looks down to the non-existent space between them as if to point it out, but any intention gets lost when she sees his chest rising and falling, when she feels his breath breeze past her lips, when the backs of his fingers brush her thighs.

His thumbs are pressing so hard against the fabric that they’ve gone stark white.

She would wait out an eternity if they could exist like this through it. If she could have him grounding her. If she could have the knowledge that she is grounding him in this way.

If they could have this explosive quiet, and the careful beams of lightning travelling in the air after each forever.

There’s no rush to break silence when they’re like this. There should be a rush. They should have to say something. But they don’t.

Clarke feels almost drowsy with the peace it brings, when they’re like this.

And he has never touched her here. She’s pretty sure this contact is riddled with electricity. She’s not sure she could think something like that up from nowhere.

She watches as Bellamy swallows thickly, tracing that peculiar lump in his throat to avoid his burning eyes. And then something flickers in the pit of her stomach, and she has to look him in the eye.

He held her all night, he was her rock for as long as she needed. Now he needs a rock- if the worry in his shoulders is anything- and she needs to be strong enough to hold him up. So she looks him in the eye, and he is watching his hands like they aren’t really there, as though he is convincing himself that he’s imagining it.

“You want to keep this?” he asks, tugging a little and making the creases through the front of it unwrinkle.

Clarke doesn’t know if he means for right now- if he is asking if she’d like to keep wearing it for now- or if he means for the foreseeable future. Either way, she doesn’t exactly want to get out of it. Not when it still smells so much like him.

She nods, and he misses it because he’s not looking at her face.

Taking his hands away from his own shirt, Clarke leads Bellamy over to his bed, because there’s no way they’ve recovered from last night, and she wants to get rid of the height difference between the two of them, for now. When they’re standing, it is so easy to fall into him holding her.

He doesn’t even question what she’s doing. It really is like a trance, how they fall on to his pillow. How Clarke climbs in first, wriggles up against the wall with peeling paper, and waits for him to follow. She balances on top of the blanket, pressed on to her stomach with her cheek flat against the pillow, and he fills in the negative space by lying down on his back, his head hovering on the rusted metal bar just above the pillow.

Clarke shuffles up so that they can be face to face, and Bellamy has to turn his head to see her; which he does.

She takes him in, just as he takes her in. It takes minutes, if that, for him to change his mind and move closer, so close that if she were wearing glasses, she’d have to wipe them of his breath.

He’s not leaning into her, but he’s still watching her, intently enough that it feels like he can read every thought that passes through her head.

“What are you thinking?” he wonders, tact different for the first time. His voice is patient, like there is nothing weighing them down.

Clarke shakes her head; she has no idea. He deserves more than no idea. She lets her hand dance across the highest point of his arm, doodling the first thing that comes to mind into his shirt. He watches amusedly.

“I miss the rain,” It feels like an admission, or some sort of confession. Like she shouldn’t be saying this to him. She still does, and worlds are lifted from her shoulders when she says it. “I haven’t seen rain in forever.”

His reaction is unexpected but not unwelcome. Bellamy’s smile widens, so that his cheeks become the most important part of his face for a moment.

“You don’t make it easy,” he sighs when Clarke raises an eyebrow.

“Huh?”

“Octavia was happy with a knife.” The knife that Lincoln found for her. The knife that Octavia’s boyfriend found for her. “How am I supposed to get you the rain?”

Clarke feels herself blush, but she doesn’t acknowledge it, not in the way that he does. His eyes clinging to the redness in her face like it is valuable. She focuses on his shoulder; on whatever it is she’s drawing.

“I’d be happy with a knife too,”

“You’d be compromising,”

“Remember the storm?” she hums, pressing her face some more into the pillow. Bellamy’s arm is in between them and it looks awfully lonely. She’s such an idiot- of course he remembers the storm. “It’s stupid.”

“Tell me,” he presses, the second Clarke tries to close off. He leans towards her some more, and her hand lowers to his chest. She wants to hold him, to take the tension that he shouldn’t have to deal with. She hates that he feels responsible for her hurting herself.

“I felt small. Really small. I think we need to feel like that sometimes. I think it helps,”

All of this heat, this sun. It is so much pressure. Burning is good, burning feels good, but not when she’s tied down to one place, to one building.

“I miss the rain,”

If everything could feel as light as it does right now, everything would be hers. Maybe everything will never be hers. Maybe she should learn to accept that.

“It’ll come back,” Bellamy gives up with lying on his back, and turns fully on to his side, his arm reaching out to press her back forward, to move her into his space before it retreats again, just as he did in the hospital bed a few days ago. Clarke keeps her hand on his chest and moves it down to the space around his wound. She rubs her thumb against his side with intention, hopes it gives him some sort of relief. “It’ll come back.”

She nods. She knows that. Rain, storms, always come back eventually. Eventually is just a long time.

Her eyes close. Clarke thinks for a minute, tries to say so much with just her touch, in the way that he can. His hand reaches up to her face, and she wonders what he is trying to do when his fingers touch lightly to her chin, until the contact feels scratchy, and rough, and she remembers how hard Roan threw her to the ground yesterday. There is probably some dried blood on her chin, probably a scab. Bellamy holds her like there is nothing ugly about it.

“Sorry for scaring you,” she whispers after a while, wanting to give him everything.

“Don’t be sorry,”

“Sometimes it’s just… too much,”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he hastens to let her know, his head shifting minutely, but it makes a difference. His forehead touches to hers.

“Thank you,” Clarke bends her knee some more, fits it to the curve of his hip. She thinks some more, can’t help drifting back to all of last night, to when she noticed him starting to space out. “I really hate that you broke your hand.”

He takes his time in figuring out what she means, the air easy around them. Like the plastic window pane they almost broke by sitting through together.

“It healed,” he says, as though that makes it okay. It doesn’t. “I didn’t know that you-”

“That I what?”

“That you were so worried… when it was me in there. I didn’t even think that you…”

So that’s what he was spiraling about. The idiot.

“You wouldn’t,” Clarke simpers, can’t be mad at him for that. She looks down further, to their slotted legs. He wouldn’t know how scared she was, how everything vanished when she found out he got hurt. He wouldn’t know that food stopped existing, and sleep stopped existing, and that she entered into such survival mode that she almost punched Lincoln- the most passive man she knows- in the face. He doesn’t want to hear about it though, not in detail. “You were right; I needed to slow down today.”

She doesn’t have to see him to know the smile on his face, verging on smug, too fond to quite be smug.

“Are you feeling better?”

Clarke breathes deeply, her hand morphing into a fist before she can stop it.

“Most days, the scars don’t bother me. I can get past it. Others, they’re all I see,” she says, meeting his eye tentatively. “It becomes one big cycle. I feel broken, then I hate that I feel broken which makes it worse, then I get angry that I let myself become so weak as to believe that this is what broken is. And there’s always something worse. There’s always another dragon to slay. There’s always another monster under my bed.”

Bellamy nods, which helps so much. Because he understands. He understands on a level nobody else could.

Her fist catches his shirt inevitably, and she’s bringing him in closer in a way he won’t ever throw in her face, because she needs him desperately.

Her chest lands against his, and Bellamy links their feet in together.

“We get forced to face the fact that no one really stays,” he whispers, his voice hovering. “Some days, the world just won’t let us forget it.”

And her heart breaks.

“Is that how you feel?” Clarke asks, clutching tighter, her eyes practically bleeding into his. His filled with so much dimension that they don’t exist here. They exist somewhere else, somewhere that people like her should have to earn a ticket to.

He nods reluctantly, his head ducking against hers.

She hasn’t brought up his mother to him. He needs his time, to open up about something she suspects is still a raw wound. But when he wants to talk about her, Clarke is here. His mother left him, so definitely yet so without resolution. She left him. Octavia is slowly leaving him, removing herself from the bubble that they existed in for so long.

“Nobody has stayed,” he admits, biting his lip, but not shying away. “Nobody ever stays.”

She won’t push him to talk about Aurora. He’s letting her in enough as it is already. That conversation will come with time, with a day where they aren’t recovering from a shock to the system of their family. Today, Bellamy needs reassurance, and he needs commitment. He needs to hear that he is wrong.

“Bellamy,” she whispers, pressing her forehead tighter to his. He breathes deeply in response. “ _I’m_ staying. I will stay,” a pause, to make sure the room is quiet enough for him to hear her. “I’ll be your nobody.”

And his nose brushes against hers, his hand slips around her waist smoothly, in a way that makes Clarke glad that she’s lying down, otherwise this would knock her off her feet. And his nod is an acceptance, an admission of his own, that says he needs her just as desperately.

Neither of them can say how much they need the other. If they could, they wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

“Okay,” he whispers back, to her lips, words breaking through the centimeters of air between their lips. The metal of his bedframe creaks, in its fractured state, and she looks into his eyes to make sure he knows just how much she means it.

There are unfinished rings on her palm that remind her of pain, but there are stars in her eyes that remind her of love, and she is in love with him. She is in love with him beyond time and beyond fracture and beyond blood. She is so freely in love with him. So Clarke makes sure that this offer is a promise. This promise is something she won’t let break. Because she needs him, and he needs her and it is so unbelievably simple.

 

…

 

“Clarke, would you quit looking at me like I’m a kicked puppy?” Raven throws her head back into her pillows, her leg, in all of its caged glory, thrusting towards her.

“I can’t help it,”

“Yes you can,”

Clarke is balanced at the end of Raven’s bed, legs crossed as she leans forward, playing with her fingers awkwardly.

“I just hate seeing you like this,” she admits, gesturing to the frozen way she is laying. Granted, this isn’t the worst case scenario.

They have been lucky in more than one way. Apparently Raven is going to have to deal with some lasting nerve damage to the area that they tried to carve out, and the prodding and peeling that the medics did hasn’t helped the aftermath, but Clarke will suppose that it was necessary.

So they got lucky. Because Raven can walk, and she can stand for herself, and from what they’ve tested so far, she’s got almost full mobility with the brace.

But that’s with the brace. Without it is another story, one that isn’t going to be reality for a long time.

“I’m just glad to be alive. I thought I was a gonner for a second,”

“Are you really okay with staying here though?” Clarke asks, needing to know. Raven wouldn’t admit it to anyone else if she weren’t. “You’ll be happy, without being part of the Ark?”

She found out, pretty soon after coming here, that Roan has suspended her for the foreseeable future. It’s not like Raven can leave with her leg not up to scratch, and it’s going to be a slow healing process, if it ever heals fully.

“It’s not everything I am,” Raven shrugs, her eyebrow raising to let Clarke know that she’s a little disappointed. “Plus, I’ll have more time to work with Wick on the comms systems. You’re the soldier out of us two Clarke, I was always just tagging along for the ride.”

“You-”

“I loved hunting with you, don’t get me wrong,”

Clarke looks over to Wells, who is hovering over at the med station to give them some momentary privacy, pretending like he’s not watching them from the corner of his eye. He hasn’t left since Raven was brought in, and she’s not sure he will any time soon.

“You’re just the best of both of us,” Clarke grins, nodding over at him. “You’ve got his calm and my…”

“Fight,” Raven is shaking her head softly, almost as though she’s in awe of what she’s seeing. But she’s only seeing Clarke right now. “I’m going to be fine, Griffin. It’s shitty. Sure, it’s shitty, but I have what I need.”

“You’re too good for the rest of us,” Clarke sighs, thinking back to how devasted she would have been if she couldn’t shoot from her injury, if it had had any sort of physical lasting damage. But Raven is the logical, practical one, and that probably won’t ever change. Nobody would want that to change.

“I get to be a scientist again,”

“You’re going to turn into Jasper if you’re not careful,”

“Beats being dead,” she shrugs, not a hint of animosity between them.

Clarke stays for another couple of hours, and they wave Wells over eventually, and he joins the bedside with air that she hasn’t seen so warm in a while. Beneath what is spoken, Raven thanks Clarke for doing what she did yesterday. Even though it didn’t feel like much at the time, even though it felt as simple as hardwiring.

And beneath more words, Clarke lets her know that it’s okay for Raven to live for herself, that she should be with whoever it is she wants to be with, and she should do the thing she wants to do.

“Does that mean you’re moving out of Ark?” Wells asks at some point, out of nowhere, almost but not quite mortified.

“Not if I can help it,” Raven shrugs, resilient. “I’ll stick around until Roan kicks me out.”

“Or until your leg heals,”

“Sure,”

Clarke is getting up to leave for the team meeting, and she hovers to ask Wells if he’s coming too but he brushes the invite off, says he’s on shift and Roan will understand. Everyone will understand, she assures him.

“Try to be free tomorrow night!” Raven calls after her, making Clarke spin on her heels with fond exasperation.

“For what?” she wonders, eyes narrowing.

“We’re celebrating,”

She thinks back to last time they ‘celebrated’.

“Being alive?” Clarke asks, knowing the answer already.

“Exactly,”

This won’t be like last time. This will be better than last time.

 

…

 

The meeting is swift and pretty much useless. Only six people show up; Octavia and Lincoln are conveniently missing, Miller and Gaia are on watch, Cage has either missed the memo or hasn’t bothered to show his face, and the others are probably going to be using the excuse of still being shaken by the close calls lately.

Clarke wishes that were a substantial excuse, but it’s not like they can just stop going out because of the risks that only seem to be rising. The base won’t function properly without them doing what they do.

Still, Roan calls time on it five minutes after he’s divided the watch shifts out between everyone.

When he places Bellamy’s name into the rota, the man in question manages to set his shoulders firmer, his lips twisting into this smug, little self-satisfied smile. Clarke pushes him away when he cranes over her to see who’s schedule lines up with his, her hand refusing to linger on his chest in front of the others.

He doesn’t seem to have that problem, choosing to hover over her, lean into her, tease her constantly with eyes aflame. She waits to be reprimanded, like they’re kids giggling at the back of the classroom, but Roan is too busy growling into his hand to really pay much attention to them.

He’s not sending a mission out, like Clarke thought he would be, not for a couple of days. He tries to walk Niylah through the math he’s done on the food count, on the medical supplies, on the rest of the basics that they’re going to need for the rest of the base. At a push, they’ll be able to put off leaving again for a couple of days.

She supposes it’s not the worst decision in the world; it definitely gives them time for themselves. If she’s not the one making it, it’s not like there’s a lot she can do about it. She’s a little worried about suffocating, but spending time with Bellamy is the pump to her gas cannister, and breathing isn’t a concern when he’s here, when he’s happy too. Breathing isn’t a luxury either, it’s a right.

“You think you’re ready for that?” she asks him when everyone else has left the rec room, and they’re sprawled across the flimsy mats, him on his side, Clarke with her head resting at the top of his legs.

“I think I need to be,”

“Bellamy you shouldn’t push yourself if you need time. No one expects you to be-”

“ _I_ do,” he shakes his head. “And I need to be ready to fight again Clarke.”

“You know I’m not the person to go to for that,”

“I hate training with Octavia,” Bellamy groans, then looks around hastily to make sure she definitely isn’t here. “She makes sure you know when you’ve lost, plus she knows all of my weak spots. I need to fight with someone I can actually-”

“Hold your own against?” Clarke asks, so that he doesn’t have to dig himself a hole.

He nods sheepishly. If he weren’t playing with the ends of her hair, she might be annoyed.

“We’ve got watch all day tomorrow, then Raven’s planning something in the night. After that though, we’ll figure something out,” she muses, twiddling her fingers so that it looks like they’re crawling along the ceiling. “I’m not going easy on you.”

“I’d be offended if you did,”

“If you’re really that bad we’ll just get Murphy to give you a round,”

“If I’m bad enough that I can’t beat Murphy, I’m afraid there’s not much hope.”

Maybe it’s strange that it’s getting so easy to joke about, that they aren’t being more tepid around the subject, but Clarke prefers it this way. Laughing is easier, and it should be easier.

“Come on,” he sighs, and Clarke feels her hair rain down over her face as he lets it fall from his fingers, from all the way above her. She twitches her nose to get rid of the tickle it brings with it. “Sleep?”

Sleep sounds good.

Clarke doesn’t expect Bellamy to let her stay with him tonight. Last night was flush and red from the rawness of what happened to Raven, but now the tension has simmered, and she’s a lot less emotionally vulnerable than she’d been this time yesterday.

She reckons she could brave a night alone, in her grounded single bed, and not be too bruised by it. It is her room after all.

So she spends the idle walk back to their dorms figuring out how to say goodnight, and how to say thank you without being too heavy, and it’s all for nothing because Bellamy takes her hand as they approach her door and he steers the both of them straight past it.

He’s letting her know that she doesn’t even have to ask. That she won’t ever have to ask. That if she wants someone with her, of course he’ll give it to her.

He hands Clarke the same shirt, the one she left folded on his pillow like stars that got left on a particular street in L.A.- one that has probably been driven to rubble by now. He tries to leave the room again, but it’s late out and the room isn’t so small that they’re going to be forced to get changed still in contact with one another.

Instead, Clarke just turns her back to him and shoves it over her head before he can so much as finish his sentence. When she looks back around, his face is a few shades darker, and he’s biting his lip so hard it’s gone white, wearing this smile like he’s just won something. It’s pretty much the definition of adorable.

She takes the time to braid her hair, sat on his mattress. Then he’s reaching over her head and she asks what he’s doing.

“Getting the pillow,” he answers, like it’s obvious.

“You’ve already got one,”

“For me,”

He throws it down on to the floor, in line with the one on his bed, about a foot lower.

“You’re not sleeping on the floor,” Clarke shakes her head, face dropping, because of course he’s got to make this difficult through obscene chivalry.

“I don’t mind,” Bellamy smiles, almost amused at the thought of minding sleeping on the floor. “It’s all the same to me.”

“Bellamy,”

“Clarke,”

“Don’t expect me to take your bed for myself. It’s not happening,”

“Don’t try to out-stubborn me Princess. You won’t win,”

But she’s thrown by how flippantly he uses the name. She gets thrown each and every time he uses it lately, because it only comes out when he’s not thinking too hard about the words he’s saying, it only comes out when he has no idea he’s letting it slip. Clarke gapes up at him, as he narrows his eyes at the mattress on the top bunk, trying to figure out if it will fit in the space left on the floor. He decides to try it, lifts it over his head as though it weighs nothing, as though he didn’t just get shot in the abdomen, grunts, then lets it land down beside his bed.

He puts the pillow at the head of it, and it is almost high enough to be completely along the plane of the original, missing accuracy by an inch or three. Clarke folds her legs so that he can kick it straight against the bedframe, winded and speechless.

“I’ll sleep on that one,” she clears her throat, tying the end of the braid violently.

“What’s the difference?”

“This is _your_ bed,”

“And I’d like _you_ to sleep there,” Bellamy mirrors her chiding tone, eyes trained on the mattress.

But really, there’s not that much of a difference. He’s still going to be next to her either way, within her reach, and it’s verging on one in the morning.

“You’re not going to give in are you?”

“Nope,”

“Fine,” she throws her hands up, already scooting down the bed so that she can lie properly. “But just for tonight.”

He waves shallowly, like he doesn’t believe her. Like he doesn’t want to believe her.

His pillow smells so gorgeously like he does, so Clarke turns on her side so that she can get to him some more. There’s something fulfilling in taking up the center of his bed, like she’s being wrapped up completely and utterly by him.

She closes her eyes while he gets ready, lips twisting to hide the slightly awkward smile, and she hears him land heavily on to the mattress. She can see through the metal bars of the bedframe now that it is on the floor, can see to the peeled corners of ill-maintained wallpaper.

Bellamy is already looking up at her when she turns to him. She wonders where the moonlight is coming from.

“Goodnight Bell,” she hums, still smiling when she closes her eyes.

“Sweet dreams,”

For a moment, Clarke highly doubts that’ll come true. And then she thinks back over the last few nights, how she hasn’t actually slept a night without him close, how she hasn’t had a nightmare since before he got shot.

Her hand falls from her level, and his makeshift bed is high enough to catch it without it fully straightening.

If she doesn’t get reprieve from nightmares tonight, it’s okay. Because he’ll be here when she wakes up, and he’ll call her Princess and he’ll hold her hand, and nightmares are nothing in comparison.

 

…

 

Clarke can tell this is going to be a mistake from the offset. Or even if it isn’t going to be quite a mistake, she can tell that it should be.

She guides Octavia through to Monty and Jasper’s lab when they finish their watch shift together, and although Raven told everyone to get here for eight o’clock sharp, they’re the first ones to arrive.

She’s not surprised to see them already pregaming, or to see the nine test tubes scattered around the central counter top. They cheer when the girls open the door, and Jasper jumps so quickly from his chair that it goes toppling backwards.

Octavia blends in here just as well as she does in most places; not at all. Clarke knows what she is like when she is drinking: still has no sense of a filter, still has an admirable buoyancy, but she becomes ten times as loud, and seems to take up the entire space of a room.

It’s funny to see, and Clarke is glad she will get to see it tonight. Jasper and Octavia click instantly, so well that this surely isn’t their first encounter. They manage to be here for five seconds before he’s already showing off the conical flasks they have in a cabinet on the far wall, seemingly miscellaneous, but they all know better.

They have upgraded since the lot of them were last here. Gone is the one huge beaker of colorless fluid- now they’ve replaced it with actual shades of purples, and blues, and a dark grey that Clarke takes note to avoid at all costs.

Monty explains them quietly to her, amidst the bubbling over of the other two, his amused expression hovering over them, tired and content as he always seems to be.

She tries not to think about what Bellamy told her, knows it’s none of her business. But she sees the exhaustion in Monty’s eyes and can’t help but wonder if it’d still be there if things were different.

Raven and Wells show up, both of them walking side by side, Wells’ grimace at having to sneak her out of the med ward clear as day, and Monty and Jasper crowd around her to check out the hardware. It is helping her knee function, and she’s clearly able to hold her own weight at least while standing. She’s happy. She’s so happy that Clarke is almost burning with respect.

Jasper decides there’s no point in waiting for the others to get here, knows they’re probably going to arrive on their own time anyway. She sticks to Monty, because Octavia and Jasper are rampantly discussing the attempts that have been made to add some sort of flavor to the homemade moonshine, and Raven and Wells are talking intimately at the counter, enough to put Clarke off the idea of third wheeling.

“I’m sorry we haven’t seen you,” Monty says, opening the door to one of the cabinets. “I know you’ve had a rough couple of weeks.”

“Not me,” Clarke lies. “They’re the ones who got hurt.”

He only rolls his eyes, to let her know that he can see straight through her.

“I’ve been meaning to bring you this,” he lifts her forgotten iPod from a pocket like it’s been hovering at his fingertips for days. “I had a look through the library; there’s an… interesting mix.”

“Thanks,” Clarke grins, taking it cautiously, patting the pocket she adds it to, to make sure she remembers it this time. “How have you been?”

“Oh you know…” but she doesn’t quite know with him. He’s a mystery buried beneath the mysteries of so many others. “Carrying the base on our shoulders gets a little tough sometimes.”

“I can imagine,”

“But it’s our responsibility at the end of the day. Scientists were the ones who made this thing, we’ll have to be the ones to fix it too,”

“Scientists?”

He nods, wearing a grimace; she helps him carry a violent purple filled flask over to the counter along with the emerald that is sort of fluorescent in some lights.

“That’s the best idea we’ve got,”

“Well you’re doing a good job, Monty. The med ward alone would be lost without the two of you,”

“You’re just saying that because we’re giving you booze,”

“Maybe,” Clarke laughs, shaking her head easily. They’re similar people, her and Monty, and she wants to know him like she knows the others. It’s a shame that they’re in such fixed classes, literally divided by floors and floors.

She’s about to retort with something else when the narrow hole in the wall becomes congested with shadow, and her eyes catch on his midnight hair, his intimidating presence, the way she knows he’s already looking over to her before she can beat him to it.

His smile is soft. Every smile of his is soft, like he’s making sure to treasure each one. Whatever he’s seeing in her, he looks like he’s treasuring it.

He walks in with Murphy and Lincoln in tow, the three of them together seeming so normal which feels… it just feels warm. It feels right.

He ducks his head to the floor, not because she’s seen him, not because of anything really. He’s just so used to it. Clarke waves over weakly, her hand sticking in the air to tell her to do more than this. His soft smile hasn’t left his face, and she hasn’t seen him all day, not since she crept out of his room in the early hours of the morning to get downstairs for her watch, since she left him asleep on the floor, since she peeled his hand from hers after they became linked in their sleep.

She squeezes Monty’s arm, gives him the best looking glass in a way of saying ‘have fun tonight’, and she meets Bellamy in the middle, both of them having crept around the outskirts of the lab to avoid the noise already growing. He leans his hip on the raised counter, higher than the one in the middle, his arm leaning too.

“You shaved,” Clarke grins, the brave inside of her baring its soul because of how happy everything has the potential of being right now.

Bellamy ducks his head again, lifts a hand and scratches it along his jaw. She watches to see if it cuts his fingers- she’s not sure how he manages to avoid that. Clarke sees the blush on his neck before he can raise his eyes again. When he looks up, smiling shyer than ever, she rolls her eyes.

“Come on then,” he bursts, because she’s too busy burying the flush in her cheeks to say anything. “What’s the verdict?”

“I’ve seen you without a beard before. Stop pretending to be self-conscious,”

Plus it hadn’t been much of a beard to start with. Nothing like Murphy’s or Roan’s, just the hint of overgrown stubble, just the hint of heavier shadow.

“How much have you had to drink?” he cocks an eyebrow; wary, verging on amused.

“Nothing, why?”

“You’re blushing,”

“It’s hot in here,” Clarke shrugs, but looks away, just in case he can see through the lie.

He knows he’s good looking. He knows he is so much more than good looking. She’s not going to sit here and feed his ego with compliments that he has undoubtedly heard a thousand times over. Or at least, not until she’s had a drink or two.

She watches as Octavia and Jasper cross their arms together and as they take indigo shots in sync, not wasting any time. It’s really hard not to laugh at Jasper’s reaction in comparison to Octavia’s.

“You sure this is a good idea?” Bellamy asks, a lot closer to her than he was a moment ago, his arm behind her back as they both lean on the side-line. He doesn’t sound too put-out, just unconvinced.

“Definitely not,” she shakes her head, not turning to him. “That stuff is genuinely lethal.”

“So I’ve seen,”

“Yeah,” Clarke winces. “Sorry about that.”

But Bellamy only winces too.

Murphy and Lincoln are trying to throw a plastic bottle cap into a beaker from either side of the table, neither of them too focused on the drinks being passed around, neither of them turning their noses up at them either.

“I know one of us should stay sober,” he starts, his voice rugged in her ear as it always is. “Just for… preservation. But I think I’m weaker than I’d like to be.”

“I think we all deserve a night off,” Clarke twists her lips, catching Raven’s eye when she walks across the room with Wells’ hand at her back. The brunette lights up the entire room with her smile, like the ceiling has dimmed down just for her entrance, her hobbling, slightly awkward entrance. “Especially you.”

“Are you drinking?”

“If there’s any left by the time your sister’s finished,”

“Okay,” he nods, relenting, that cocky smirk on his face like he’s getting away with something.

Murphy slams his palm down against the table when Lincoln obviously beats him in the game where the rules seem a little too abstract for anyone else to keep up with, but he spins in his stool and jerks his head at Clarke, to call her over, not even bothering to catch her eye.

“Duty calls,” she huffs, her head leading the way in pulling her weight from Bellamy’s warmth. He nods easily but doesn’t follow when she treads over to Murphy’s side to see what he wants.

She can still feel his eyes on her even as she takes an empty beaker and positions it in the place where his had been, even as Lincoln sets her with a glare holding competitivity like she’d never have expected.

Monty and Raven find their way over to the corner, craning over something about the size of Clarke’s thumb, thin enough to fit under a tongue without trouble.

She loses her first game, and Jasper shoves the emerald flask into her hand before she can react to Lincoln’s self-satisfied, mellow expression. And then she’s downing at least half of it, and it tastes a little better than the bleach they were drinking last time. The lingering taste of apple sits somewhere in her mouth, nowhere near strong enough to actually find it.

Her head feels heavy enough with just that forfeit, and Jasper’s beaming grin lets her know that she’s probably already drunk more than she should.

For some reason, it’s funny.

Murphy takes the glass from her hand and finishes it off. She wishes she could have his poker face, wonders how much he’s actually had to drink in his life to get that sort of skill.

Wells is over talking to Bellamy, a lot more subdued than the rest of them, yet they’re still sharing some colorless liquid between them, and Bellamy actually laughs at something Wells says. Clarke gets a little too caught up in the sight of that.

Octavia grabs Clarke’s arm and steers her over to the other side of the room, where she takes what looks like a few sheets of colored plastic, clear- which Jasper says they use to increase the efficiency of the algae growth- and she makes Clarke stand on top of her shoulders so that they can cover the lights on the ceiling with them. Clarke doesn’t put up too much of a fight- the harsh fluorescence could use some dimming anyway.

It’s a shoddy job, certainly home done, and the sheets are sure to fall down one by one throughout the rest of the night, but now the room is darker, and colored, very close to being a little like a club. A silent club.

Lincoln drunk is pretty much Lincoln sober, just a bit more smiley, and a little more handsy with his girlfriend, but he’s still smart enough to know to keep it under the table, to keep it to the moments where Bellamy is preoccupied. Clarke steadily loses the ability to have control over her tongue, and she vaguely feels herself ask him where his name comes from.

He tells her it’s a family name, nothing interesting, but everything seems interesting right now. So she makes him trace all the way back through the generations that he can recall, tries to repeat it back so that she’ll remember it tomorrow, but he laughs at her when she gets it wrong over and over. It doesn’t feel like she’s getting it wrong, she’s pretty sure she’s saying exactly what he’s saying.

But then she drinks some of the translucent orange mixture, that reminds her of Thanksgiving and pastry, and her mind is literally spinning on its pivot.

Jasper and Octavia break a test tube somehow, and then the latter leans on Clarke’s shoulder sleepily as she reels about how they should have all done this way earlier. Clarke knows to keep her mouth shut for that one, just in case she’s not aware enough to avoid opening a can of worms.

And then the sound of feedback shouts through the room, like that of a broken sound system, and Jasper falls off of his chair because he jumps so much, and Murphy slams his forehead down to the table as though that’ll get it to stop.

“Sorry,” Raven calls, her and Monty still huddled over the same spot after an hour.

It’s still blaring, so loud that Clarke is pretty sure the floor above will be able to hear it, and Wells runs over to go and help cut it off, but he is unnecessary since Monty finally turns around and walks back over to the group, a little black square in his hand with wires peeking out underneath it, holding it with his fingers in a net because he probably doesn’t trust himself not to break whatever it is.

He holds an empty hand out to Clarke sheepishly, and she stares at it for a moment, not sure what he’s asking for. So she just takes it in hers and smiles.

Monty laughs. “We need music,” he shakes his head and Clarke remembers the brick in her pocket. She doesn’t mind giving it up for tonight, as long as she’s able to have it again eventually.

She hands it over and watches in awe as he hooks a load of stuff together, and then, for the first time in so long, Clarke can hear actual, real music. It’s a band she can’t recognize, but it’s good, verging on pop, verging on punk, verging on rock.

The last time she heard music was during that quiet watch shift, when they had to abandon their truck and she’d come so close to smashing their radio to pieces. When Bellamy scooped her up in his arms and told her of his mother’s dance lessons and spun her around and made her smile and held on to her like his body knew what was about to happen over the next couple of days.

The first night Clarke got drunk with Monty and Jasper, it felt like friends hanging out. This, with the homemade colored lights and pitchy music, feels like as much of a party as they’re ever going to get.

Raven is looking smug when she walks over to the rest of them, takes the stool that Wells offers up, and she watches fondly as Octavia drags Jasper over to a space to dance.

Hours pass. Hours and hours pass, and with each one, everything becomes more hazy, more unsteady, more like the ground beneath Clarke’s feet isn’t ground at all.

The music gets louder, more people start dancing, even Monty, which is a surprise.

She slumps down next to Murphy after more hours, taking a break from shouting across the music to everyone for a moment, because she knows he won’t speak if he can help it.

Clarke scoops up the closest flask she can reach, and downs half of it before she gives it to him.

He watches her curiously as he drinks from it, his expression not quite so easily concealable now that his blood is on fire with the alcohol running through it.

“You’re obviously not drunk enough,” he smirks, his smirk not quite a smirk in this light. It’s a bit too fond for that.

She doesn’t realize she’s smiling up at him until it’s too late.

“Not yet,”

He leans in.

“I’m not going to dance with you,” Murphy tells her, as though that’s why she’s here.

Her nose wrinkles up.

“Good,” Clarke decides, leaning her head on his shoulder since it’s so close. He doesn’t shove her away. With her eyes closed, the room feels so much smaller, and the music quietens, and she really, really trusts him- in a way that nobody knows. “Are you unhappy?”

“I’m not surprised,”

“You deserve better,”

He doesn’t say anything. Clarke’s eyes are wet, but she doesn’t know why.

Murphy lets her stay for as long as she wants. Hours might pass.

 

…

 

Clarke only starts dancing when she physically has to.

She remembers the first time she got high, when it kicked in for Raven a lot faster than it kicked in for her, and she had to sit and watch as Raven kept raising her hands in the air, said it felt like she was pushing against something, how they were floating, how she couldn’t not do it.

This feels a lot like that. Except it’s not just her arms, and it’s not air that she’s fighting against.

It’s the sound of ‘Just the two of us’ filling the room, and the unavoidable requirement to move that comes with it.

She’s already standing, listening as Raven retells a story about Isaac from when he was a baby to a few of them, and then her feet are two stepping before Clarke can do anything to stop it.

And she closes her eyes, so that she can picture the sky-borne castles, and she knows she is a bad dancer, but it is fun. And then she’s on her own, test tube spilling over her hand with the grey stuff, and she’s still moving her feet against the tiles like they’re made of ice, heels off the ground, shoulders rolling back in sync to the music.

She grabs at a hand, anyone’s hand; it happens to be Octavia’s, and she wrenches her over to the small amount of space they’ve made by pushing stools to one corner. They’re singing the words obnoxiously to one another by the second verse, way before the cow bells start to kick in, and she’s spinning under the brunette’s limp arm easily, biting her lip to keep from singing too loudly.

Her hair is loose and sticking to her neck, there are cow bells forever ringing in her ears when the song comes to a close, but her cheeks are hurting. A lot.

“Where’s my brother?” Octavia asks, taking Clarke’s test tube without permission. “He only dances when he’s drunk.”

That’s not true.

“I’ll find him,” Clarke grins, congratulating herself for holding out for so long.

And find him she does, sprawled out on the floor with his head next to Jasper’s, both of them facing the ceiling and looking severely out of it.

“M’not the person to ask,” she hears him say to Jasper, who is wearing his goggles over his eyes.

Jasper scoffs, and Clarke looks to the ceiling to see what’s so interesting. He whispers something into Bellamy’s ear, which must be pretty funny because Bellamy bursts into lazy giggles, his shining teeth unmissable, his eyes closed from the roof, not turning away from it.

Clarke lies down next to him, the top of her head slotting against his collar. When he turns to her, his expression simple and intoxicated, Clarke realizes just how close she’s let their faces become, her nose bumping against his from upside down.

“Hey Soldier,” he grins, bumping his freshly shaved chin against her forehead.

“Octavia wants you to dance with her,” Clarke tells him, fixing the wrinkle in his t-shirt on the other side of his chest. Bellamy turns his head to the side reluctantly, to look for Jasper, but his voice can already be heard from the other side of the room. “Why are you on the floor?”

“You’re on the floor,”

His eyes look huge from here.

“I think I drank too much,” he mumbles, and Bellamy takes his time to raise his arm above his head. Clarke gets enraptured with watching the way his fingers spread above them both, fanning out across a boring ceiling, like they’re trying to catch on to something.

She mirrors him, just to see if her straightened arm can reach his. Obviously, it can’t, so he bends his a little.

His fingers look like they’re playing the piano. They could be. She can hear a piano.

Her knuckles brush against his, locking into place, his still moving just with something connected now. She wriggles a little, to use the top of his shoulder as a pillow. Her arm aches, but it doesn’t matter.

“Tell me something,” she hums, because she might have just fallen down a rabbit hole into her happy place.

“Nuh uh, too drunk,”

She clamps her lips together, riding out her amusement at the way he says it, like he knows he’s going to get in trouble.

They’re quiet, and Bellamy keeps control of the way their hands are moving together. She can hear ‘Pumped up kicks’ on the speaker. Her laces are untied and there is broken glass on the floor.

“I tried to draw dandelion seeds,”

Bellamy is quiet. The floor is vibrating under the two of them with all of the bass from the song.

“I tried to draw dandelion seeds and I couldn’t. I was twelve, and dad said if I blew at one, I could make a wish. I tried to draw dandelion seeds, but they turned into people, the shape fell into fairies, the heads looked like daisies, and I couldn’t draw dandelion seeds. And dandelion seeds became snowflakes because I picked one from the floor and never found a match, and snow became a weed, and snow became a wish. Why can’t we blow into snow and scatter snowflakes like we do to dandelion seeds? Why are we convinced the winter can’t be broken so easily as spring?”

Bellamy still says nothing, and Clarke closes her eyes because she’s pretty sure that sleeping here is as good as sleeping anywhere else. She’s drank a lot, and she’s laughed a lot, and she’s back with her person.

Songs pass. Hours pass. She doesn’t recognize a lot of these hours, but that is because she hasn’t heard them before.

Usually being drunk helps numb everything. Not tonight. Tonight, everything is burning. The ceiling is burning when she finds fire inside it, her throat is burning, her toes are burning, the speakers are burning, and it hurts.

It hurts to care this much. It is looming agony.

“Do you want to dance with me?”

She might not have heard this song before, but she knows exactly who is singing it. And maybe, if her memory isn’t being too hopeful right now, she has heard this song.

Maybe it has fallen from his closed lips while she buried herself in blankets of thunder and night, and Paul McCartney was her favorite Beatle.

“This is it, isn’t it?” she asks, her throat dry, because of course he remembers the storm.

Bellamy’s voice is impossibly deep, and thick, and trembling thanks to all of the booze.

“What do you think?”

“It’s good with words,”

He lets it play some more before he prompts her again.

“I can see why it’s your favorite,” Clarke smiles, with her eyes closed, his fingers latching around hers like he’s rolling wooden balls around his own.

“Do you remember, on one of the first days, when Octavia ran off and we had to follow her through the fog, and just before the ambush you-”

“You fell right on top of me?”

“I heard it. Just this, over and over, I heard this,”

“You’re right,” Clarke smiles tightly. She stands to her feet, and her legs are so wobbly that they feel half their size. Barely managing to pull him to his feet, she breathes. “You’re drunk.”

He nods, not sadly, not shyly, just clear.

He’s still got her hands in his, and Clarke follows the song to its end, until something else comes on, and she recognizes Billy Joel, and she recognizes ‘She’s always a woman’.

And they’re not going to dance, because the room is small and busy, and buzzing, and his feet are grounded. But she does like this song, and she is chasing the looming agony, and every single vein in her body is pumping white hot adrenaline.

He’s wrapped around her waist. She is watching his lips with impossible focus, because they are shining, they are spotlights, and he takes his bottom one into his mouth with his tongue in a hypnotic movement.

Billy Joel is singing about his thief, but his eyes are hooded over, and the whole room darkens, and Clarke reaches up, to his heart, in the way that she used to do. She is both bracing herself and falling into herself when her palms rest flat.

Her tiptoes carry her like they did hours ago, or minutes ago, and she is glad that her hair is down, because her blush is something she can only bear him seeing. And she’s blushing, and she’s shaking, and-

“Bellamy?”

He responds by moving a hand from her waist, keeping the other one around her, pulling Clarke closer and closer as he cups her cheek. She leans into him; loves the way his palm can fit half of her face to it.

He brings her in closer.

“You’re going to hurt me again,”

She doesn’t mean to say it like that, but maybe that’s how it should be said. If she were sober, she’d be more careful, more wary. Maybe caution should be thrown to the wind with this.

And Bellamy is too strong to back down, to wince, or to apologize for another time (which Clarke knows would just weaken his others). He grips her face with that strength, and he might be drunk, but he still has as much conviction as ever.

He uses his pinky finger to tilt Clarke’s jaw up, and Billy Joel is singing about blame, and the room has burnt up so much that it has physically melted away.

His thumb presses into the divot in her silhouette, and his hip knocks into hers, her shins brushing his, and his face tilts to the side.

She might be on her tiptoes; he’s still going to have to lean down. He does, so slowly, so carefully. He’s giving her time. He’s grabbing time by the shoulders, time who she has been trying so hard to compel and thrusting time towards her with his strength and his conviction and his certainty.

He’s giving her an easy out, the promise in the hold of his hands a surety that she can leave if she wants, leave and he’ll still be with her for whatever she needs from him. Clarke is too wasted.

She is wasted.

Wasted in love, and in pain, and in the song she hears when she looks into his eyes like that.

She is wasted in time and wasted in stars.

He shakes his head, not shielding himself from her eyes, and she bites her lip to remind herself that it is hers before it becomes his.

And Billy Joel is singing about shadows, but they are already swamped in shadow.

He leans closer, and her nose brushes against his again, and that contact alone sends heat off the grid, off the map of her body, to a thousand locations and not a single compass on Earth could find them all.

And Bellamy breathes heavily.

“So are you,” he whispers, staying exactly where he is. “But this is different.”

“Why?” she chokes, wanting to know where he keeps his wishing well of confidence. Her laces are untied and there is broken glass on the floor and she isn’t sure there is anything that can stop her from wanting him this much. His thumb strokes her cheek, learning its delicacy, framing her blush.

“Because I’m not scared anymore.”

And Clarke barely has a second to take a breath, which is cool and sharp like the corner of his jaw, and she remembers to close her eyes as he does, and her heart is gone to be with the pixie dust.

And Billy Joel is humming, and Bellamy’s bottom lip touches to hers, and glass hits the wall behind them so violently that it can’t be an accident.

More than one vial breaks, more than one flask and more than one beaker, and glass is raining in succession, and Bellamy moves them so that he can stand in the way of raining glass, so that he can shield her without even realizing what he’s doing.

All thought of Bellamy’s lips disappears when Clarke breaks out of his grip to see Murphy storming across the room, crushing glass into the floor with malice enough to burst the bulbs above them, and slamming the door behind him with vigor enough to blow the speaker to dust.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Melting darling, and I can't let go,'  
> \- She Burns, Foy Vance
> 
> btw, the Beatles' song? I've just seen a face.
> 
> also, I feel like I need to clarify... they didn't just kiss. sorry.


	44. Our love spins a gun around its finger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I've said it, I'll say it again for anyone who needs reassurance: I know what is happening with this story. The large majority of the rest is already written, so suggesting what should happen and where (or what I'm doing 'wrong'), really isn't going to make a difference. This isn't in reference to comments here, it is in reference to anonymous "asks" I've been getting on Tumblr. If anyone wants to send me anything constructive (literally anything but a drag), I'm always happy to hear it. But please, to the people who are trying to dictate, don't assume you have control over my writing, because it can be quite insulting, just like telling someone that they have made a 'mess' of their story, and that they have told it in 'completely the wrong way'.   
> Sorry if I sound abrasive or ungrateful. Not my intention at all, I just wanted to give my reply to all of the anonymous messages. :).
> 
> Anyway, this chapter is A LOT, and I really hope you enjoy it.   
> \- Em

“What the fuck?” Bellamy demands, with verging on dangerous aggression, and he’d be scary if he weren’t so confused. He has got Clarke under his shoulder, and she’s clinging on to his chest. The others look completely and utterly shocked; Clarke can barely take any of this in, can barely register how much is actually lying broken on the floor.

Raven is the only one to have any sort of reaction; she looks scared.

“What the hell just happened?” he asks again when no one answers him.

“He, well he-”

“Wells,” Clarke snaps, because stuttering isn’t going to fix anything.

She untangles herself from around Bellamy; Monty is already trying to clean the glass up. The speaker really is broken, Murphy must have swept it to the ground on his way out.

“I kissed Raven,” he says, and he speaks so quietly that she has to crane to hear it. He is riddled so explicitly with guilt, from his head to his toes, and he’s refusing to meet her eye which is rare for the two of them. Normally, he is able to face everything head on. “I wasn’t thinking, I…”

“Shit,” Octavia growls, slumping into the closest stool and holding her forehead between her fingers, either to massage out the already developing hangover, or because this is too much.

Octavia knows, just as well as Clarke does, what effect this is going to have on Murphy.

Bellamy’s hands are in fists, his eyes shooting all over the room, and this feels a lot like falling out of her pixie dust dreams. Moments, seconds ago, she was so blissfully happy.

Raven stands shakily to her feet, but her knee starts to buckle already.

“I’ll go and-”

“No,” Clarke holds her hand up, blocking anyone else from getting out of the room to follow him. “Don’t.”

It wouldn’t end well. Not while they’re all drunk.

“Clarke he just trashed all of their supplies,” she says, as though she’s being unreasonable.

“And what is you chasing after him going to do?”

“It’ll help him!”

“No, it’ll help _you_. It’ll make _you_ feel better,” Clarke doesn’t want to be harsh, or cruel, but she’s going to be honest. And she knows, for a fact, that having Raven or Wells follow him would only make him worse. “I’m going.”

“He won’t-”

“Go to bed,” she tells the rest of them. “Party’s over.”

Octavia nods bitterly, actually angry, and it’s probably a good thing they’re calling time now. This, that, whatever it was, has sobered the majority of them up completely, and Bellamy is already helping Monty with the glass.

He nods at her, his eyes still full and cloudy even if nothing else in him is, and he tells her across the distance to go, to do what she needs to do. He’ll take care of the rest of them if she needs to be with Murphy.

And that’s the only grant she needs, before she’s tearing out of the room, and is practically sprinting down the halls to get to the mountain of a staircase. The air feels cleaner than it did inside the labs, and there isn’t a single thought running through Clarke’s mind on her way towards Ark floor, because she is recovering from the fire that Bellamy just gave to her, and the way she jumped out of her skin at the sound of Jasper’s beakers hitting the wall, and the thought of Murphy being forced to see something like that.

When she reaches his door, his and Wells’ door, Clarke hesitates for a moment. He is unsteady, and angry, and he isn’t predictable no matter what anyone says.

There’s as much chance of him flipping out on her as there is of him letting her in.

When Clarke knocks on the door, she is forced to remind herself of the countless times she has looked fear in the eye, and rugged words play over in her head, ‘I’m not scared anymore. I’m not scared anymore. I’m not scared anymore.’

Her knock is consistent with the alcohol in her system, and she wonders if she only hears it so loudly because of the lack of white noise in her ears, or if she’s actually almost breaking the door down.

Murphy takes so long to answer that she decides to lean against the wall to wait, knowing that if he opens it, she’ll be far enough away to give him space, close enough for him to know that she’s right here.

She rests her head against the wall, back flat, eyes closed as she tries to remember what is actually going on.

His face is blank when the door drifts open, and he is holding it straight with his forearm to stop anyone from coming in. He sees Clarke, and he might as well be seeing a ghost.

Clarke doesn’t react. She can’t.

Instead, she waits for him to make the first move. She’s drunk; she’s not an idiot. She’s drunk, but she’s probably his best friend. She knows him bucket loads more than she could ever drink.

His eyes are incredibly heavy, and his face is the face of a man who looks tired of everything, of the world, of the shadow that follows him whenever the sun decides to shine.

He doesn’t say anything. He moves away from the door with pathetic laziness, backs away, probably because he can’t be bothered to stand right now.

Murphy leaves it open, his arm waving so flippantly that Clarke can’t make out the gesture. Keeping the doorway empty is as much of a direct invitation to come inside as she’s ever going to get.

Shutting the door behind her back tentatively, she adjusts to the darkness he’s let take over the room, and watches as he heaves himself on to his mattress, ducking his head uncomfortably to keep from hitting the ceiling.

There’s not really anywhere else to go, not in this darkness, so Clarke just follows him up there, and sits in the same place she did all those nights ago, when they argued about sour patch kids and he told her his name.

It’s awkward. There’s no way to lie about it. She’s drunk enough to be aware of every little movement, to not be able to process any of it. She’s not sure he can process anything either.

Still, he’s not telling her to fuck off. And that means enough.

So Clarke lets her shoulder rest against his and doesn’t bother counting up in her head, finds she doesn’t need to, just sits for an abstract amount of time, waiting for Murphy to do something. To move or to speak or to throw something else against walls that really aren’t strong enough to take anger like that.

The only sign she has that lets her know that he knows that she’s here, is his heavy breathing, the breathing that says he’s not asleep yet, that he’s not falling asleep anytime soon, and that he’s not exactly calming down, but he’s not seething either.

And then, out of nowhere, when doors all around them have closed, and she knows the Blakes have returned to this floor, when more people are scuttling around to get to their witching hour watch shift, or to do whatever it is people do anymore, Murphy breaks down.

It starts off quietly, unnoticeable, so Clarke doesn’t notice it, and stays as she is. But then the jolted movements of his chest become too extreme, and he’s making this noise with his mouth that sounds like agony. The agony she’d been walking towards hours ago.

She glances curiously up at him, her intoxicated state must read as something similar to a child’s, wanting to know more, as much as she can get, not knowing what boundaries are surrounding her, which ones are laced in gasoline, which ones have matches ready at the edge of each ring.

She flickers up, and it’s so dark in here, he’s got one of those cloaks over his head. The ones made of vacuum and ether, nothing, but tears are fractious things, and she’s not going to miss them even if he were to try to hide them.

He isn’t trying.

He is staring ahead of him, like he can see something, like he’s reacting to a sad movie, and it is painful to see.

Murphy isn’t ice like this; his nose is running, and he isn’t bothering to wipe it, and his eyes are bloodshot, and his breath smells of stale beer. And he’s crying, which isn’t fair.

Clarke rubs at her own face, because seeing him hurting in her already pretty emotionally vulnerable state, is enough to set her off. This isn’t about her, and she’s not here to make this about her, but she can’t help crying too. So she rubs at her face and takes his weight.

She winces when he lashes out again. When so much crying passes that his chin has become a melted icicle, dripping regularly into his lap, and Murphy brings his knee to his chest just so that he can gather the momentum to kick out, and he is still wearing heavy boots that drive through the metal bars to the bedframe as though they are really made of rubber. The piping creaks loudly, smothered by his messy grunt, and he leaves a clean divot in the line of it, one molded to his foot.

He does it again, as though this bed is a cage, as though he’s trying to break free of it, as though he can’t just climb down to get his breath and his solidity back.

The bar doesn’t break, but it does gain a chink. She wouldn’t have been able to do this to her own bed, even in sleep.

On the third time, Clarke closes her eyes, because she can’t take seeing him fall apart like this. The more he cries, the more he kicks out, and the more he kicks out, the more he cries.

She can’t bring herself to tell him to stop.

There’s still a hole in the wall above his pillow that reminds her of how he didn’t do that when it was her. How it would have been cruel- the opposite of a mercy- to do that.

And when he speaks, his voice is hoarse. It’s really what a broken voice sounds like. Not because he’s been crying, or because he’s been shouting.

“It’s not going to happen,” he drawls, his eyes rolling slowly like his pupils are running from the still swelling tears. “I can’t do it.”

And then, because she can’t find words yet, he adds: “I’m never going to be able to do it.”

“Do what?” Clarke asks, as gentle as she knows, trying not to watch him because she’s worried the rawness he’s showing will close off in the next heartbeat.

“Get over her,”

It’s not enough for Clarke to understand. Not completely, because it feels like there is so much left unsaid for her to truly get it. She learns why when he carries on, his voice no louder than a mumble, his tone angry and resentful, but carrying with it a sadness she’s very rarely ever heard. She’s only heard it twice: once when he confessed his part to play in Emori’s death, and once when he told her the story of his parents.

So that sadness, is enough of a hint. This isn’t about Raven either. This is so much more complicated than jealousy.

“I learnt her. I learnt her so well, and I… I gave her everything in,” he squints his eyes so tightly that Clarke worries they won’t come back when he opens them. “Months. It didn’t even take months. I spent every second, every day with her. I smiled when I was with her. I laughed out loud. I was _fucking_ happy.”

Clarke can’t let her face change, because she’s nervous. His teeth let out that dwindling snap that they can make when they’re ground too hard.

He takes some time.

“Before you… before you died I was using Raven to see, to just find out if there was ever going to be a shot of getting over her. If it were going to be anyone, it’d be Raven. I wanted to fall in love with Raven, and I...”

He looks like he’s being tortured, like he’s being cut open and his face is one that fights against the unravelling of his organs. His voice dulls, the emotion getting carried away, spilling and running like his organs would.

“Emori was the love of my life and I’m never going to get over her. I don’t want to be in love with her anymore, Clarke. I can’t stand it. It’s fucking agony,”

But it’s not that simple and they both know it.

Clarke is speechless. There’s a knife right there in his gut, and it is burning its way through him, but she can’t see it, and she can’t take it out.

“You’re wasting time. You’re wasting time you don’t even know you have. If he feels for you even an ounce of what I felt for her, you are wasting everything. Because if he dies tomorrow, this is what you become. And if you die tomorrow, this is what he becomes. I know you don’t want that,” he tells her, his words morphing and melting into one another, and he sounds a lot older than twenty five. He sounds ancient, and he sounds like a man who has travelled across borders and across fire. “I know it’s not healthy, or ideal, or something you’d choose, but you don’t understand how much you have right now. I let her take me. I gave myself to her, and she had me when she left. I’m never going to get myself back.”

She wants to tell him that he will. That he still can. But it’s been almost a year since Emori died, or at least since they met, and he’s still nowhere close to being okay. Here she was, thinking Raven and Wells’ connection would cut him, how childish she’d been.

It is harder than that. It is more inescapable than that.

Clarke starts breathing heavily against him, feels the hold of his shoulders start to seep. He speaks with a whisper, because maybe that is all he’s got left.

“I wanted to love Raven. But she deserves so much. She deserves Wells,”

And Clarke has never doubted that. She does deserve Wells, but that’s not to say that’s all she should have gotten. She never wants to know the messy details of what went on between Raven and Murphy when they got to Vancouver, because it will never be her story, and it will hurt more than it should have to.

“She deserves Wells,” he says again.

And Clarke leans her head on his shoulder, because they’re both too drunk for their own good, and sleep isn’t going to help in the slightest, but it’s not going to make it worse. She’s not sure what could make this worse.

No. If she weren’t here, things would be worse. If he weren’t actually voicing this, things would be worse.

He leans away, slumps down on to his pillow right next to the hole she made through the plaster, but in his wasted state, he stretches his legs out over her lap, telling her to stay. Telling her he needs her.

Maybe he’s not telling her anything at all.

“She deserves Wells,” he mumbles, face drowning in his pillow and his back rising slowly above the blanket.

The kiss might have been a catalyst, and Clarke is no closer to knowing how he’s going to process the potential of Raven and Wells finally being together, but it’s a problem for tomorrow. A problem for when lead isn’t flowing through his veins in toxic concentrations, and when pastry isn’t running along hers.

 

…

 

Clarke wakes up to the sound of her alarm with Murphy’s boots still heavy on her lap, his obnoxious snores filling the room completely, and the taste of ‘morning after’ on her tongue. The room is turning around the center of it, like a sideways Ferris wheel, but Clarke can’t find the off switch, or the plug to pull.

The scar at the back of her head is pulsating, in the way that it did last time she got this carried away, and she wonders if this will happen every time she drinks. If this is a symptom of hangover that she’ll have to get used to.

He’s snoring so thickly that she’s pretty sure he won’t be awake for another couple of hours at least, but he is heavy in his sleep, almost like he is locking himself in a cage of it. Clarke doesn’t want to wake him, because his eyes are patched like homemade blankets, and bringing himself back into what happened last night is not going to be easy.

So she takes the boots from his feet, because she forgot to do it last night, climbs down from the bed and lifts the blanket from Wells’ bed over her head. Murphy is on top of his, and there’s no way she’s going to get it out from under him.

She tucks it into his mattress, because maybe he needs it. She’ll never know whether or not he does, because it’s something he would never admit to. She’s fine with not knowing.

She closes the door behind her, breathes in deeply to get rid of the stale smell of ‘too much’, and she knows how badly she needs to shower. The brick in her head isn’t going to fade if she doesn’t, so Clarke goes to the room that she has started to spend less and less time inside, can’t remember the last time she actually slept in here, and grabs the things she usually takes to the shower.

It’s early. She doubts there will be anyone else awake. She doesn’t bother getting changed in the bathroom and decides to just risk walking over there, across the few doors down, in a towel. Her body isn’t quite something to be ashamed of anymore; even if someone saw her, it wouldn’t be the worst thing.

She leaves her shell of a bedroom, Raven’s bed colder than the snowflakes she remembers ranting to Bellamy about last night, and her bed an omen of bad dreams that always feel just two steps away.

She is distracted walking to the bathroom, because her footsteps are painfully loud, and last night has thrown her for a loop, Murphy’s warning, Murphy’s spiraling, it’s too much. To see someone who has spent the last year brushing away every little bit of emotion, handling even the most chaotic times with detachment, lose it is scarring.

And Clarke has no idea how to help him. She wants to, so badly, help him, but she can’t. Because she didn’t know Emori, and she has no power at all or say in who Murphy loves. She can’t flick a switch to make it go away. Even if one existed, it wouldn’t be her right.

He is strapped down, cuffed and bound, to a chair made of electricity, and she’s being forced to watch the wires come alight. And what’s the alternative? Become emotionally void? Stop the conductivity his body should have just for his own survival?

“Woah,” she’s being caught before she even knows what’s happening. “Steady.”

Clarke looks up, blinks, settles when she sees it’s Bellamy with his arms around her. She hadn’t been looking when she walked through the doorway, had thought no one would be awake, but he’s standing here, hair dripping cold water down his back, carved skin exposed and still clutching to the droplets lining the golden complexion of his chest.

She stutters over nothing at all, because his hands are on her waist to keep her upright, to stop her from falling back after running straight into him, and she’s clinging on to her towel for dear life.

Clarke knows she’s never going to be as agile as she’d like to be, knows that the head injury has fucked her up permanently in some way or another, and combining that with a hangover is only going to heighten it, but damn if it isn’t annoying.

“Please,” she closes her eyes, masks a smile over her lips to make sure she doesn’t look on edge. “Stop shouting.”

She doesn’t dare look down to his waist, where there will inevitably be a towel hanging low on his hips. She doesn’t dare look down to her weak spot.

Instead, she looks up, catches his eyes in hers. Maybe she’s got more than one weak spot.

Clarke scoffs. “Of course you look fine,”

Of course he has no remnants of last night under his eyes. Of course he looks like he could run a mile if she asked him to. Of course he still looks fresh, and gorgeous, and ready for war.

She clutches tighter to her towel, his forgotten hands still balancing on her waist.

“Fine?” Bellamy hums, eyebrow cocked, confused but playing along. At least he’s not being loud.

It’s ridiculous really, how easy it is for Bellamy to replace her fake smile with a real one. Ridiculous. If he had his way, she’d be smiling for the rest of her life. Without even choosing it, it’s what would happen under his control. Idiot.

Clarke shakes her head softly, too in awe of his glistening shoulders and soaking hair to muster up an answer.

She’s glad she needs to hold on to the towel, otherwise her hands would have free reign to choose where they go. And with his hands on her hips, splayed and secure, she’s not sure that’d be the best idea.

His face calms.

“How’s Murphy doing?”

Not ‘what happened last night?’. Not ‘what the hell was he thinking?’.

‘How is he doing?’

And to think she believed he didn’t care. She is floored more, each passing second that she gets to know him, by his commanding heart. By the way heart radiates from him, demands the entire room, demands the entire world. She is in awe of the way he feels, the way he channels feeling.

“It’s…” and how can she explain it? How can she tell him that he is a trapped man, gagging on love that he doesn’t want anymore? How can she tell him that tragedy is rippling through the surface of his eyes, that he is crippled by something that can’t be undone? “Rough.”

And she doesn’t want to lie to him, so she adds, “It’s more than rough.”

Bellamy grimaces, genuine concern pouring out of him. Clarke can’t imagine getting through a single day that doesn’t involve his touch at least once.

“Is there anything I can-”

She shakes her head. There’s nothing anyone can do.

“I’m sorry you had to deal with the clean-up,” she says instead.

He shrugs. Of course he does.

He still hasn’t let go of her. Clarke knows he knows what happened last night, how close they’d been to crescendo. She can taste his bottom lip on hers if she tries hard enough, even if it was just a feather against the ground, even if it was just the lightning quick of a fuse blowing.

‘You’re wasting time you don’t even know you have.’

But what can she do?

Bellamy’s eyes haven’t left her face, haven’t dropped any lower.

Tentatively, Clarke takes a hand from the edge of her towel, raises it up to his cheek, and it looks so small against him. She moves her thumb just over the corner of his mouth, wipes the tiny bit of lingering toothpaste away with delicacy he might not actually feel.

He sure doesn’t react; his eyes stay burning into hers even while she’s focused on his mouth.

Then she remembers the scar lining her palm, how it must be touching to his cheek right now, how he must be biting back a wince at the feel of it.

Her hand flies away like a shock, and she fists it to hide the bumpy skin. She hates this. This inability to get over a hurdle that should only be two feet tall, a hurdle that sometimes her legs are long enough to breach.

Bellamy has done well, over the past few days of her shyness with this scar, but he notices it now. She knows he notices it, because his hands tighten against her waist, hold her stronger, and Clarke drops her head to avoid pity, drops her head so that her forehead is almost brushing his chest.

Would it be weak to ask for a hug? He’s pretty good at them. He’s pretty much the best at them. Would it break something to mention last night, to tell him that she can still feel ash on her bottom lip?

“Are you okay?” he mutters, bringing her closer with his grasp of her entire frame.

She nods without looking back up.

“Are you?” because he’s forgotten his own wellbeing, as he so often does.

“Well I don’t think I made as much of a fool of myself as last time,” he says. She doesn’t have to see him to know the slanted grin he’s wearing.

Clarke smiles at her feet.

“Me neither,” then she remembers something. “Sorry that I bored you with dandelion talk. I don’t think it meant much of anything.”

Bellamy’s hand rises up her back, an invitation to lean on him if she needs to. She doesn’t take it.

“I thought it was beautiful,” he hums into her ear, his head dipping to rest on hers. They’re so close to hugging, touching in all of the places that would define a hug, just with some space between them. “You’ve never seen the things you can say.”

So they’re talking about it. At least that’s something. Clarke has Billy Joel replaying in her head, over and over.

“Was it weird spending time with Monty?”

“Not as weird as I thought it would be. Jasper was weirder,”

“Why?”

“He was asking me how he should make a move on Maya, as though I’d have a clue,”

“Well I don’t know about that,” Clarke smiles, leaning away to look up at him, unable to help herself. “You’ve got game.”

“Being in love was the biggest mess I’ve ever made. I should definitely not be giving advice to someone about it,” he says blankly, as though they’re discussing the weather, his soft acceptance verging on something sad.

Clarke is, and always will be, the stilted one when he says things like this. He needs no recovery; she needs every ounce of recovery left. And how on Earth is she supposed to read into that? He couldn’t be anymore vague if he tried. Not without being so simultaneously upfront.

“You’re telling me,” she tries to laugh as she steps out of his hold, the realization that they’re both in issued towels, standing in an open doorway, actual rocks against the back of her eyes. Bellamy moves to hold the door open, still watching her curiously, but about to leave, nonetheless. “I talk to Murphy as though I have any sort of idea of what love actually is. I feel like such a fraud: I tore it down and rebuilt it into something unrecognizable. _I’m_ the one who broke love.”

If they’re going to be honest, she might as well tell him.

“But you-”

“But I what?”

“But you told me you’ve never…”

He doesn’t know. He _still_ doesn’t know. He must do. He can’t not.

Clarke reels back through their playbook, tries to find a crumb of an admission, of _something_ she can use to prove to him that she’s already told him. But she can’t. There’s not a shred, not a relic, of words spoken about her love for him.

So this is it. And his face is so torn up, so confused, like he’s trying to trace back too and find a time she told him about an ex, or someone who would have ever gotten close enough. As though close is not relative to him, and him alone. As though every single person in her life hasn’t been acres away from where he has been. As though close is not his.

Clarke’s mouth opens, but she can’t think of anything. Perhaps they should be touching for this. Everything quietens when they touch. But no, he’s about to leave, and she’s clinging to her towel for dear life.

She has to watch as he figures it out for himself. The closer he gets to understanding, the further he gets from this dimension. He forgets he’s leaning against a door, forgets they’re in a dingy bathroom, and all that exists is this _fact_ lingering in the air between them, this potential lingering in the air between them.

“Oh,” his teeth snap together, and he nods his head towards the ground, digesting it.

“I’m sorry,” Clarke says, weakly. Because she’s always been weak with this. “I thought you already knew.”

“No,”

“Right,” She nods her head too, because that’s all she can do. And then she looks around flippantly and catches sight of herself in those mirrors. Of course she looks like this right now. Of course she looks absolutely dreadful, and undeniably hungover. Clarke bites her lip bitterly. “Well…”

Bellamy clears his throat, drawing her attention back to him, but his face has gone sort of pale, and when he makes that noise, it sounds heavy, wet, emotional. It sounds guilty and… no. It doesn’t sound guilty. It sounds devastated.

Maybe she has her answer after all. It’s over. It’s done with.

Clarke clamps her lips together tighter, because this hurts. And he’s looking all over the place, as though to find a corner of the room that will solve all of this.

“I’ll let you shower,” he manages to get out, though it is certainly pained, though it is clearly choked. Then he disappears, and the door closes after him, and the beads running down his back go with him.

With her heart too. Her heart goes with him too.

 

…

 

Roan tells her she’s leaving today. The team meeting is a lot busier than it was two days ago, just a few of them missing because of watch shifts. Clarke learns that Bryan has dropped out of being a member of the Ark, and Roan doesn’t give a reason why, but she’s pretty sure it’s because of the injuries that he’s had to see recently.

They’ll make do without him. It just means a busier schedule. It just means more risk for the rest of them.

So the chains her mother has bound to her chest have been lifted. Clarke is pretty sure it has something to do with the way she let loose at her the other day, but she’ll take what she can get.

They’re leaving later tonight, are going to a warehouse just a state down. They’ll be back within the next couple of days, she’s sure. Maybe even by tomorrow night.

She does get stuck on how many names Roan reads out. Five, he only mentions five, himself included.

She’s sat at Murphy’s side in the meeting, Bellamy and Octavia opposite them both, far enough away for her to be able to talk to him without them overhearing.

He growls when he hears she’s leaving.

“Back before you know it,” Clarke shrugs, slightly guilty at the thought he’s going to be here, tied down just as he was when Raven left, and he’s not going to know if she’s safe until it’s too late.

Murphy shakes his head at the floor. She doesn’t know what to do to help him, which is so much scarier than chasing down a burning planet.

Lincoln and Nyko are coming, so she’s not going out with almost-strangers. She likes Lincoln. She trusts Lincoln. He saved Bellamy’s life.

 

…

 

Clarke knows she won’t forgive herself if she doesn’t go and say goodbye to Raven and Wells before she goes, so she drops in quickly. And they give her the expected grilling. It’d be weird if they didn’t.

Clarke folds herself into Wells’ chest, because he’s acting like he knows he should be giving her a wide birth after last night, but it isn’t _her_ drama to get in the middle of. She knew she couldn’t pick sides from the start of it, from the very second she woke up and saw the lingering ties between Raven and the two of them.

She does take him to the side, gives him a stern telling off for going about this so weakly. Murphy should have been the first person he spoke to about all of this, before he even thought about making a move on Raven. But she understands it only happened this way because it had to. The fear of permanently losing her was too much for him, the relief of having her stay was enough to cut the chains holding him back from her.

And she loves the two of them together. She always has. So seeing Raven play gently with his hand stirs something warm inside of Clarke and seeing the way Wells doesn’t hide how he looks at Raven when she’s not aware he is looking, is sort of perfect.

Murphy was right. They do deserve each other. That can’t be helped. It’s just not the whole story.

Raven gets deadly serious just as Clarke is about to leave to get her kit ready, _her_ kit this time, kit of her own because she’s earned it. She wasn’t even this serious when she woke up to a faulty leg.

“Please Clarke,” she finishes, after listing all of the reasons why Clarke needs to take care of herself. Always the personification of logic. Always practical.

Clarke nods. She’s not nervous. Not nervous at all. She’s already told them there’s a screw loose in her head. Anyone normal would be nervous to go out there after what has happened to Bellamy and to Raven in such narrow succession.

She doesn’t leave without telling Raven that she needs to talk to Murphy. She doesn’t leave without Wells’ bear hug, or Raven’s kiss on her cheek.

She doesn’t leave without a goodbye. There has been too many times where they’ve regretted that.

 

…

 

Clarke runs into Roan on the way downstairs. She’s happy to see the smirk he wears when he first notices her, because it reminds her of calm times and routine.

She’s got her bow in hand, quiver around one shoulder, and they pass a mother who pushes her son’s head down so that he can’t see the two of them, coated in weapons, ready for battle. They incite danger without meaning to.

She knows that Bellamy is on watch. She hopes that he’ll be the one to pull the lever, because there’s something abstractly reassuring about that.

Roan is ranting about procedure, about strategy, about how long he wants each person to drive for at a time. Clarke nods along the entire time, has a feeling he wants her to learn all of it. The words are too detailed to be casual conversation.

The rover is where it needs to be, Nyko already sat in the driver seat and fiddling with something in his lap distractedly. Roan nods over to Bellamy, who is looking out into the wasteland, as though Clarke hasn’t already seen him, then takes her bag with his to put them in the back of the rover.

Niylah is on shift too. She’ll be good with Bellamy taking five.

Clarke claps her hands together, like taking her bag off has left dust all over them. Maybe she’s just trying to get rid of the sweat already forming.

She clears her throat, feet away from him, and the second Bellamy turns around and sees her, he doesn’t even bother hesitating. He drops his gun, so that the strap around his shoulder swings and causes it to land at his hip, pointing behind him and away from her.

He takes her into his arms, before Clarke even knows what’s going on, and her arms are engulfed by his, her bow getting in the way of course, but his cheek is pressed to her ear and she’s being tickled by the midnight of his hair. Being surrounded by midnight even now, when the sun is still getting ready for sleep.

Clarke hugs him back. It’s a reflex by now, to do so. He rocks her faintly to the side and she can feel, now, the way he is standing too rigidly to be at ease. It’s the wound. It’s him still stomaching pain, because it’s not just going to fade. It’s going to drag, and it’s going to slow him down for longer than anyone wants to admit. It’s going to be a part of him for too much. It’ll show up when he fights, and when he ever tries dancing again, and it probably shows up when he laughs too. But he is a fighter. He is a warrior. And he is so immeasurably strong. He shouldn’t have to bear it, but he can. And that is really the most they can hope for.

Plus, when he falls, if he falls, he isn’t alone. He isn’t without his crutch, or his safety net, or any of the things Clarke became when he needed them.

He breathes heavily against her, his chest searching for room that it won’t find because there’s no air between the two of them.

Clarke tucks her nose a little into the space beneath his ear; she wants to remember the smell of him.

“Okay,” he breathes again. Now would be when he should let go, but he doesn’t. They must look pathetic to everyone else. They’re leaving for a day. She’ll see him tomorrow. Tomorrow feels too far, and too high.

“Would you do me a favor?” Clarke whispers, lips trailing the skin of his neck, which is gorgeously hot. Like actually hot. “Go easy on yourself while I’m gone.”

He laughs into her shoulder, and she is close to losing her balance on her tiptoes, is clinging to him to make sure that doesn’t happen. She has a feeling he’s doing the same.

“I’m being serious Bell,”

“I know,” his voice gets muffled by her hair, hair that he’s got some of in a fist.

“I’m scared you don’t know how to, not without me there. Not that you, not that you need me or anything. Just… you’re kind to everyone but you.”

He nods against her, and she holds her breath so that she can hold him tighter. So that she can pour her strength into him, just in case he needs it.

“Clarke?” he asks. He’s always asking for her name lately. She promised it to him lifetimes ago. “Come home.”

It’s not a question. It’s not a doubt. She doesn’t have a choice in the matter. She doesn’t want to have to have a choice in the matter.

“Come back to me,”

His voice is still scratchy from last night.

“I’ll try,” she hums, ready to topple over. She doesn’t know if she can be more definite than that. Just in case things go wrong. Just in case she’s forced to break a promise.

“No,” he shakes his head, rocking her with the movement. “You do more than try. You make it back, safe and sound. You come back to me.”

He’s already said that. He says it again like he hasn’t.

“I know you won’t remember this if things turn to shit, but I need to say it. For my own peace of mind,” he detaches himself, but grips on to her shoulders with both hands, their faces not far enough away from each other to be anything other than intimate. Close is him, and him alone. And she could lift her head and kiss him without much strain if it is something she thought he’d want. His eyes are focused, concentration blocking any sort of glaze, or cloud, or mist. He’s fighting emotion with survival, because she’s been with him long enough to teach him how to do that. “Nothing, okay _nothing_ , is more important than you. The entire world can burn down before you have to step out into it. Please,” he closes his eyes momentarily. “Live.”

“You can’t just say things like that,”

“It’s selfish, I know,”

Firstly, it’s not. It’s really, not.

Secondly, that isn’t what she meant.

“No, Bell. _You_ can’t just say things like that,”

“I- I,”

He looks confused, his grip faltering but not leaving, and it’s better he be confused than angry. He can’t be the one to tell her things like that, because they mean something different to her.

She knows that he loves her. She knows that, beyond everything else, he loves her. But Clarke, to him, is a memory that shouldn’t be repeated. She is a roadmap that shouldn’t be revisited, and he loves her because she’s family.

She loves being his family. She’d choose being his family before she’d choose anything else. But she’s in love with him.

So hearing things like that are bittersweet enough to make her nose wrinkle and her teeth fall out.

“I need to go,” she sighs, wishing she could stay in his embrace forever, but glad that he’s not leaving with her. She needs his recovery, more than she needs his warmth.

Bellamy’s face is almost hard to look at as she detaches herself, reaching for an arrow even though she’s not going to have to fire any time soon. His eyes are wide, his mouth open like there’s something else he wants to say, but still crestfallen.

“Don’t die,” he calls, when Clarke is completely out of reach, nearing the rover, prepping to climb inside.

She turns back, smiles smartly despite her breaking heart. This sort of heartbreak is soothing in comparison to the type she’s already had to dredge through. This sort is manageable. This sort is one she can keep in a glass jar and examine as it flutters around its new world.

If it means coming home to him, she won’t dare die.

 

…

 

She only notices the sixth member of this group when the doors are closing, when the engine has already started, and Cage is stretched across an entire bench like he’s the only one here. Lincoln, too cordial to say anything in dispute, and Gaia, too in her own head to care, are both sat on the other.

So it might just be a day, but when he turns into a Cheshire cat, his tail invisible, his giant head separate from his own body, his arms holding his head above him absurdly, to make himself look taller, and bigger, and more impressive, this day is not going to pass with compassion.

 

…

 

Clarke gets to take over driving at midnight, and she gets Lincoln up front with her navigating, so she manages to escape Cage’s snoring as much as she can. He’s obnoxious, he’s out of place, and she thinks she probably hates him by now.

She dreads the thought that she might have to actually rely on him to keep her alive. She dreads having to consider him her equal.

Lincoln makes easy conversation, the kind that never really fades into something awkward, even in the silence.

Clarke understands why Octavia is so taken with him. He is calm beyond belief. He treats this life as though he is fortunate to even have this, and that is admirable. He is respectful, and honest, and when they get to the warehouse, parking lot empty of cars, back doors the kind that it’ll take four men to lift from the ground, she sticks to his side.

There’s no splitting up. There’s no need to.

They spend hours picking through boxes, kicking doors down and scouting out individual rooms to make sure there won’t be any surprise encounters. Clarke kills a walker when she opens the door and it is right behind it, as though it has been clawing its way out for a year. It is slow, putrefied. If it weren’t, she wouldn’t have time to react. If it weren’t, she’d be dead.

Cage pats her on the back, his shoulder shoving hers as he moves past her to get the arrow from the walker’s eye. He doesn’t hand it back. Clarke looks to Roan, to ask if it’s too irresponsible to start a fight here and now. He shakes his head. Don’t do it.

Instead, she holds her hand out, taps her foot impatiently as the others carry on to the door opposite this one. She could lock Cage inside of this office if she wanted to.

He’s looking at the arrowhead eagerly, as though there will be instructions on how to use it written along the tip.

“Stop wasting time,” she growls quietly, so that she won’t be noticed if there are any walkers roaming halls. “This isn’t a game.”

“That depends on how you look at it,” he grins. “It is sorta fun.”

“You’re sick in the head,”

He beams, as though she’s given him a compliment. The way his gaze lingers on her, the way his eyes follow each and every movement she makes, suddenly makes the danger of the unknown feel like safety. Anything is safety in comparison to his greedy eyes, the possessive growl she knows is just waiting behind his throat.

“Give me my ammo, Wallace,” she snarls, and doesn’t wait for him to offer it before she’s snatching it out of his hand. “You don’t do that here.”

He just snickers. The day she finally gets to punch him will be a good one.

“Lighten up Clarke. _You_ just made a kill. It’s the closest thing to porn I’ve gotten in a while,”

She’s ready to throw up.

“This isn’t a game. Stop talking about me like I’m here for your amusement,”

He mumbles something under his breath; she’s glad she doesn’t catch it. She leans against the wall while the others finish raiding the other barren office, closes her eyes and thinks of Bellamy, thinks of home.

They leave when they’ve got all the food they can fit into the rover, cans and cans and cans. So few things are left undecayed. She wonders what they’re going to do over the next couple of years, when even the unperishables become rotten.

Maybe they’ll be producing algae enough to live off of it. Gross.

 

…

 

They run into trouble during the last stretch of the journey. Clarke is in the passenger seat, has refused to get in the back, has claimed lack of fatigue to stop anyone from complaining too much about it. Part of her just needs to keep as much distance from Cage as possible. If he gets a hand around her ankle, or a grip on her wrist, she could get stuck.

Roan is driving, and she doesn’t recognize the road up to the base at first, because she hasn’t seen it from this direction before.

It really is out of the way. There are dirt roads to get through, and unforgiving hills to climb, and windy paths that are probably incredibly easy to get lost through. There’s no wonder why this is one of the only bases to make it. If Roan weren’t navigating, they probably wouldn’t make it back.

She had assumed the amount of walkers they get is normal. The ones that reach the circumference of the safehouse are enough to keep the Ark guard on their toes, but now it is clear that this is bare minimum. They get the fewest number of unwanted visitors possible.

Still, that doesn’t stop the middle-aged man from breaking through the tree line, his grunt hungry because the engine is the sound of meat to them. The rover is the sound of blood.

It screams. Even with the windows up, they can hear its scream, and Clarke watches in awe of what it does, how it acts, how there’s something… human to its demeanor. It throws itself into the road, straddles the dashed white line that should be defining two different lanes, and through the bars, through the glazed window, its cataracts find her.

It finds her, and sees her, and bares its rotting teeth to her, to say ‘you are mine’. And then it looks up to the sky, making direct contact with the sun. Maybe that’s something the walkers have over them. They don’t have to avoid looking at the sun.

Clarke wishes she could close her eyes, wishes she could get rid of that poisonous thought, but she’s too distracted by the way it shouts, and it is _communicating_.

Others are swarming by the time Roan pumps the accelerator, by the time he jostles the gear stick roughly, and ploughs through the walker with vengeance. He always kills them with a vengeance. He always kills them as though they owe him something.

They do.

They owe him everything.

But it has drawn so many more to them, and they can run, because they don’t understand what falling is, or what breathing is, or what rest can be.

“We can’t bring this shit back to base,” he says, focused, eyes fixed to the road. “There’s too many.”

Clarke counts her arrows, rounding down to be safe, because she doesn’t have time to be accurate with counting.

She doesn’t want those back doors open. She’s seen them firing from it before, literally the last time they came back, but it was too much of a risk then, and it is too much of a risk now. It’d be opening a window too wide to keep things out.

There are three bars on her window.

This is… well, it’s not stupid. She’s got thirty-two arrows. She could take the majority of them out, so long as she doesn’t miss, so long as they don’t actually catch up with the rover.

“Roan, I’m gonna need you to trust me,”

“Griffin,” he warns.

“You haven’t got an alternative,” before he can cut back in, she asks him, “How close are we?”

“Five minutes, probably less,”

There’s no way they’re going to lose the horde trailing them now, not without going at a speed that’d be dangerous for all of them if something jumped out.

“Tell me when we’ve got two,”

He doesn’t look at her, just changes gear and spins the wheel with both hands.

“Blake will kill me if I let you die. Just so you know, it’s a you die, I die, sort of thing,”

“He’s on watch tonight,” she tells him. Because that matters to the plan in her head, even if it doesn’t make sense to him.

Clarke winds the window all the way down, so that the wind is flooding past her already. The bars are spaced enough for this to work. She’ll be fine. She’s going home.

Lincoln is at the mesh between the seats and the back, which is stacked, making the entire rover sit lower on its wheels. He asks Roan if he should open the doors. Clarke tells him no. Not with the food in the back, not with the barrier it will cost them.

“Two minutes, Angel,”

She doesn’t wait, doesn’t dare hesitate. She can see the top of the base from here, stark against the blue of the sky, and she checks she’s got space enough from the walkers to get to where she needs to be.

She wrenches open the passenger door, has to strain to keep control of it, because the wind and the drag on the vehicle adds more force than she can really handle. Clarke breathes, she manages. This needs to be quick, fluid.

This really can’t be a mistake. One mistake, one trip, she’s gone.

“Don’t come back for me,” she tells Roan, just in case, and he shouts her name, his head snapping to her with wide eyes and he doesn’t look like a cat today.

“Clarke!”

She’s got one hand reaching around the door, the skin of her arm looking too soft for something like this, and she grabs at the handle on the outside of it, tests the pull of it to make sure it won’t come away if she puts all of her weight on to it.

The handle holds strong, and Clarke takes her chance while she’s got more adrenaline in her veins than blood, while her heart is beating in time to her watch, loud enough for it to reach that damn base.

She stretches to grasp at one of the bars, taking it from the outside too, and then she swings around the entire door, uses the balance of her weight to slam it closed once she’s on the outside of it.

The air rushing through her hair is insane, and she can barely hear the howling over it.

She is holding on to the door, bow hanging from the crook in her elbow, every muscle in her arm working to keep her attached to it. The ground is moving so quickly below her feet, threatening to pull her straight into the mass behind them if Clarke so much as touches it.

She keeps her knees bent, has no idea how her body is even doing this.

“Clarke, what the hell are you doing?!” Roan shouts, but she’s pressed to the wall of the rover, just trailing the window.

“Trying!”

She grits her teeth together, actually grunts through them to keep her body rigid, to keep her legs from falling, and her hand is sweaty against the metal of the bar.

_‘Come back to me’_

Clarke kicks up, her legs fighting against the fearless drag. The toes of her boots catch on the space between the poles, and it’s still a struggle to stay here, to keep hold, because Roan is only speeding up.

It is less hard, more awkward to get her shins through the gaps. Clarke swings again to sit straight, and wriggles down so that she’s slotted into the window in a way that will let her let go.

She does let go.

The bars are not so close that her legs will be trapped, which is a terrifying thought in and of itself, but they’re a tight enough fit that she won’t fall easily.

The soles of her boots rest against her seat, her head is high enough to see above the roof of the rover. She doesn’t look towards the base because they’re losing time.

Clarke loads her bow, fires, fires again, loads it. The angle is a challenge, but she was born into this. She was born under the name of a soldier, of a man who could handle his weapon with grace, respect, with an understanding that he needed to be more than his weapon.

So she becomes more than her weapon, and works around the challenge of this tightness, she beats the lag that shooting arrows can give by taking two each time she reloads. They go down, one by one, get trampled on by their followers, and the purple in each vein looks artificial, and weak. They look weak from up here.

She has got her hair in her face; she’s got her hair all over the place. She keeps shooting, not watching to make sure her targets are being hit, because she trusts herself.

Maybe she has got a vengeance too. Maybe she is angry too.

Then something explodes in the distance, a bomb goes off behind her, and the walker closest to Clarke falls to the ground, its face sliding so violently against the concrete that its corpse probably won’t have a face at all. And another one goes down, and Clarke sees the hole that appears in this one’s forehead, small, deadly.

She doesn’t stop shooting. She won’t stop until she’s out of ammo.

But numbers are dwindling, and she is being swept up by a tornado. And this tornado isn’t trying to hurt her, or help her, it is just here. It is just reminding Clarke that she’s alive, that she has earned life.

She’ll tell Bellamy that she didn’t need his help, of course. But she knew he’d back her up; he’d kill to keep her safe. She knew, with chaos unmatched by this tornado, and with calm enough to throw the rover off of all four wheels, that he would protect her.

Clarke is being watched, hunted, by the walkers lagging behind the rover, because she is fresh blood directly in their eyeline. She shoots them down, using _her_ bow and _her_ arrows.

They must be driving at seventy, maybe eighty. It feels like they’re breaking the sound barrier. In one second, her targets are right there, being thrown to the ground by bullets coming from behind her. In the next, two parts of a wall are meeting in the middle, barely shutting them out.

They’re back. Someone is still shooting.

She hunches down uncomfortably to look through the window, sees Roan with both hands on the steering wheel, his foot still pressing on the brake as hard as it can, even though he’s turned the engine off already. His eyes are blown wide, and he is looking straight ahead.

Clarke follows his gaze from the outside, not bothering to see through the windshield.

They’ve stopped barely feet away from the building itself. If he’d waited any longer, a millisecond longer, a blink, the pair of them would be dead. The top half of her body would have probably become detached from her waist.

She breathes heavily, watches the tiny space between the bumper and the foot of the front wall in awe.

She has to tear away from it. It’s too surreal.

Clearing her throat, Clarke tries to be subtle, “A little help?”

Roan turns slowly, shakes his head to himself, as though to remind himself that he didn’t actually die, and then he grins. So tiredly, but so smugly. Clarke expected him to be angry, to be annoyed and frustrated with the fact that she didn’t ask him first, but instead, he watches her fondly for a moment, and she gets tired of waiting around.

With flat palms on either side of the caged window, and determination still as present as it was an hour ago, Clarke shoves against the rover. It’s tall enough to give her time. If this were a car, she’d be falling gracelessly. Maybe she still falls gracelessly, but her hands slide down below the window as her legs become free.

Her boots catch on the bars, so that she doesn’t fall all the way, and she’s not tall enough for her head to hit the ground, so she hangs upside down, both feet hooked, and tries to control the drop so that the back of her head doesn’t crash into the front wheel.

She sees stars for a moment, the scar on the back of her head reminding Clarke that sense of balance will lag, but the stars sort of chase each other to the back of her mind over the time it takes for her to reach her hands to the ground.

She doesn’t need Roan’s help in getting down.

Once her fingers are sturdy against the ground, she kicks one foot out, and lets the other follow while her leg is in mid-air. She could never really do cartwheels, but this isn’t a cartwheel. This is half of one at most, plus it’s the wrong way. She’s going backwards, not sideways. And she’s done enough sparring with the Blakes to know how to be thrown over her own head and recover from it easily.

When her foot lands against solid ground, everything goes quiet.

There’s no more shooting. Roan is opening his side door, the others are probably getting out too, and she can hear that, but it’s quiet. It is virtually silent.

Because the second Clarke manages to stand upright again, she turns, and Bellamy is sprinting towards her with his gun awkward at his hip, his t-shirt patchy in places because of the heat and the sweat of standing outside for hours. It’s okay. The sun is setting now. He’ll have relief from its heat.

Sprinting. Not walking towards her, not jogging. The fucking idiot is sprinting at her, and he doesn’t even look like his injury is hurting him. Maybe having to shoot so much has put enough adrenaline into his system that the pain is being numbed.

Clarke’s knees are weak, but she takes off. Bow forgotten on the ground, her empty quiver joining it, and she charges to meet him, because she can hear silence.

She expects to hug him. She expects to get to hug him. She’s too busy taking him in, already breathless and winded, using that as a cover for the way his body, his form, his muscle takes every bit of air out of her. The way his hair, shining in sunset, inevitably untamable, robs her of any other thought that doesn’t involve it.

The way he’s smiling. God, the way he’s smiling. That wolfish, _beaming_ , grin makes him look years younger, makes him look likes he’s caught up in a whole different lifetime, like he isn’t worried about a thing. He looks happy.

She expects to hug him, and yet, when his arms wrap around her waist, neither of them even bothering to slow down, because what would be the point in that, he lifts her off of her feet. Bellamy picks her up and Clarke has to cross her arms over his shoulders so that she doesn’t fall, and he spins her around.

His hold tight enough that he can touch his own sides, his forearms pressed to her back, Bellamy is carrying her wherever, in whatever spiral he wants, and he spins her around like he’s never going to let go again.

And Clarke can’t help squealing in his ear, from the surprise of it, from the sheer joy of it, and it’s probably out of place here, but it’s not out of place to her. He looks happy, and he sounds happy when he laughs against her, easy, weightless, just laughing. Perhaps from relief, but that hardly makes his laugh invalid. He’s laughing, and he’s happy, and Clarke hasn’t touched the ground but if she did, it’d feel like the clouds that aren’t above them.

She’d be standing on clouds.

She fists the material on his back, he’s still spinning her chaotically. They could be anywhere right now.

“I was gone a day,” she breathes against his neck, giddy.

“Give me a break,” he chides, not sounding at all put out. “I just had to watch you shoot down three dozen zombies, hanging on the outside of a car going ninety miles an hour.”

The way he says zombies, it makes it sound like he hasn’t caught up to the fact that they’re in an apocalypse. Like they’ve never had to do this before. And he calls them zombies, not walkers, which means something. It’s still a vow.

“You helped,”

“How do you know it was-”

“No one shoots like you do,”

He laughs again. It can only be described as a burst. A disbelieving ‘Ha!’, and it’s contagious.

Clarke would tell him that he can set her down if she wanted to be set down. But she doesn’t.

He moves his chin from off of her shoulder, she feels him slow down, moving into a sort of dawdle as he steadies the both of them. One of his arms unwinds itself, the other takes all of her weight. She’s unable to marvel at his strength, because his hand moves up, and his head drifts back, and the pure affection in his eyes makes her throat run dry.

His fingers are still, stable, when they brush away the hair from her face, when they land at the top of her cheekbone.

She’s above him, fractionally. She wouldn’t even have to stand on tiptoes.

“You’re brilliant,” he shakes his head, his teeth shining. “You’re so goddamn brilliant, and insane, and beautiful and-”

The heel of his palm is resting under her jaw, and his eyes are bleeding out affection.

Clarke is grinning like a four year old, like she was when she found out her father was coming home after his longest tour. She’s smiling so hard; she doesn’t even know why. Maybe it’s survival. Maybe it’s what comes after survival.

If she kisses him now, it could be awkward because they’re both smiling too much. Because every time his grin widens, so does hers, and so does his as a result of that. It’s a chain reaction. As all of the best ignitions tend to be.

Her toes touch the cloud first, her feet landing quietly. He keeps his arm all the way around her waist, chest-to-chest. Her smile doesn’t fade completely, but it settles. It is pushed back by potential.

And he walks forward, like he doesn’t know how to stop, and it makes Clarke stumble back a little. She giggles, her hands gripping to the collar of his shirt behind his neck, leans up, and takes in the way his eyes are bleeding out affection.

Takes in the easy forever behind them.

This is love, unchained, untainted. This is healed love.

Her nose brushes his clumsily, forcefully, as she keeps smiling. And Bellamy breathes through his mouth, sharp, eager for the unknown, his lips quite simply gorgeous.

Clarke bites her lip, to brace herself, to cool the giddy feeling in her veins, and his chin lifts, aiming to meet her.

But a cold hand latches on to her shoulder, and she is literally wrenched away from him, because neither of them are expecting it, because both of them are so ready to just get closer.

And Cage’s malicious grin is in her periphery when she stumbles away from Bellamy, when his hand shoots out to get her steady again, on the opposite side of her body from where Cage is gripping her down.

She doesn’t have the ability to take in the confusion of Bellamy’s glance, because she gets stuck on the ice and the still possessiveness in Cage’s eyes, how it tells her he knows exactly what he’s doing. How his grin is a performance, a gift to his audience, because what lies beneath it is stone, and so little soul that a person- although not Clarke- would have to feel sorry for him.

And the lack of a soul is callous, and terrifying, and he opens his mouth to speak, but Clarke can’t hear him, because she’s too busy being buried alive by the weight of his frozen hand on her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Our love spins a gun around its finger'  
> \- Fistfight, The Ballroom Thieves (the number of times I have listened to this song, man...)
> 
> Tumblr is cominguproses13x for anyone who wants it.


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